WPR15LA023 · Air Tractor Inc AT 301
B & R Aerial Crop Care Air Tractor Inc AT 301 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) while maneuvering
From Connell City Airport (WA14) to Connell City Airport (WA14)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR15LA023
- 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
Air Tractor Inc AT 301
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor AT-301
- 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
- N8878S
- Operator
- B & R Aerial Crop Care
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Connell City Airport (WA14), Connell, WATo Connell City Airport (WA14), Connell, WA
- Aircraft age
- About 35 years (built 1979)
- 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- Maneuvering · low-altitude flying
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot was conducting an agricultural application flight. The pilot reported that, when he was maneuvering the airplane about 30 to 50 ft above ground level , the engine experienced a total loss of power. The pilot conducted an emergency landing to a field, during which the airplane collided with an irrigation system.
The postaccident examination of the engine revealed that one of the cylinder heads had a crack in the dome between the forward and aft spark plug holes. The fracture surfaces were consistent with fatigue that had originated from multiple origins at the exterior of the cylinder head.
The Federal Aviation Administration had previously issued an airworthiness directive (AD) to address cylinder head cracking on the accident model engine. The AD required periodic visual inspections for cracks in the cylinder heads at specified intervals time in service (100 hours for the accident airplane) and fluorescent penetration inspections at cylinder overhaul. Further, the AD instructed maintenance personnel to focus the inspections on the area where the accident cylinder was cracked. According to the engine maintenance logbooks, the AD was last complied with about 225 hours before the accident, over twice the required interval. The last inspection before this inspection occurred about 180 hours previously, indicating that neither maintenance personnel nor the owner were regularly complying with the AD. According to the stamps on the cylinder, the last fluorescent penetration inspection was performed 10 years before the accident.
Probable cause
Maintenance personnel’s and the airplane owner’s failure to inspect the engine for cracks in the cylinders as required by an airworthiness directive, which resulted in the loss of engine power during low-altitude maneuvering flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR15LA023
- Event ID
- 20141028X14937
- Case number
- WPR15LA023
- 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: e5e07babb818b2974b2ea991447ea38957a7c07433197c88ab8ae60192c05cb2; retrieved 2026-09-16T01:53:26.323Z.