ERA12LA432 · Piel Emeraude CP-305
Piel Emeraude CP-305 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Johnson County Airport (6A4) to Asheville Regional Airport (AVL)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12LA432
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Piel Emeraude CP-305
- Aircraft type
- Piel EMERAUDE
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- C-FBZZ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Johnson County Airport (6A4), Mountain City, TNTo Asheville Regional Airport (AVL), Asheville, NC
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- En route · climb to cruise
- Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Loss of engine power (total)
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot stated that during his preflight inspection of the airplane he determined that the fuel was not contaminated by water or debris. The pilot also checked the weather and determined that the formation of carburetor ice was unlikely. After taking off and flying along a river valley, the pilot turned the airplane to cross a mountain range. He added power to climb, and shortly thereafter, the engine lost power, and the pilot made a forced landing into trees. The pilot stated that he did not use carburetor heat during the flight, and, except for an instance in which the self-modulating pitch propeller moved to coarse pitch during a flight earlier that day, the pilot did not report any preexisting mechanical anomalies or unusual weather phenomena. The wreckage was not examined after the accident. Postaccident review of carburetor icing probability charts indicated a likelihood of carburetor ice formation while the airplane was in cruise flight along the river valley, which would likely have affected engine power during the attempted climb. However, because no follow-up examination was performed, it was not possible to determine why the engine lost power.
Probable cause
The total loss of engine power for reasons that could not be determined because the engine was not examined.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12LA432
- Event ID
- 20120707X05302
- Case number
- ERA12LA432
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 1ad2c28fb75caeab9f972b75f1450213c4f0a76513f8f0e9e98fe413217c5b9a; retrieved 2026-09-15T18:47:27.348Z.