WPR15LA175 · Mooney Aircraft CORP. M20K
Mooney Aircraft CORP. M20K · Accident: powerplant system/component malfunction/failure en route
From Shafter Airport - Minter Field (MIT) to McClellan Airfield (MCC)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR15LA175
- 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
Mooney Aircraft CORP. M20K
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N3567H
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Shafter Airport - Minter Field (MIT), Shafter, CATo McClellan Airfield (MCC), Sacramento, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 35 years (built 1980)
- 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 · 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
- Powerplant system/component malfunction/failure
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot was conducting a personal cross-country flight. During cruise, the engine experienced a catastrophic failure and a total loss of power. The pilot performed a forced landing to an airport, landed long, and collided with an airport fence. Postaccident examination of the engine revealed internal damage consistent with the initial failure of the No. 1 piston and connecting rod assembly, most likely at the piston end, which caused a cascading failure of the adjacent piston and rod assemblies. Damage to the engine components precluded an accurate assessment of the specific initiating event, and evidence suggested that the engine contained oil at the time of the failure.
The engine had been involved in a propeller strike accident about 310 flight hours prior, which required an engine teardown, examination, and replacement of two connecting rods and one piston pin. Maintenance records did not disclose which rods were replaced. Following the repair, the engine went through a 10-year period of inactivity, during which time internal corrosion occurred. No precautionary steps were taken to monitor the effects of the corrosion, such as oil filter examination or oil analysis. The extent to which the corrosion contributed to the failure of the No. 1 piston and connecting rod assembly could not be determined.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power during cruise flight due to a failure of the No. 1 piston and connecting rod assembly.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR15LA175
- Event ID
- 20150603X50616
- Case number
- WPR15LA175
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2015-06-03.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 9fd34704716aa826b53bd6c10ddd10dc0534d8d2fb09e2d5277baf251b2248bd; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:23:18.827Z.