ERA16LA119 · Piper PA28 151
Piper PA28 151 · Accident: fire/smoke (non-impact) while standing
From Northeast Florida Regional Airport (SGJ) to Northeast Florida Regional Airport (SGJ)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA16LA119
- 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
Piper PA28 151
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA28
- 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
- N41618
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Northeast Florida Regional Airport (SGJ), St. Augustine, FLTo Northeast Florida Regional Airport (SGJ), St. Augustine, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 42 years (built 1974)
- 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
- Standing · engine(s) start-up
- 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
- Fire/smoke (non-impact)
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the flight instructor, the airplane's engine stopped producing power during taxi immediately after landing. He attempted to restart the engine, but it caught fire. He stopped the airplane, and both the instructor and the student egressed, but they made no attempt to extinguish the fire because there was no fire extinguisher on board the airplane. Although the fire was eventually extinguished by first responders, it substantially damaged the airplane.
Review of the Pilot's Operating Handbook (POH) revealed that engine fires during start were usually due to overpriming and that the first attempt to extinguish the fire should be to try to start the engine and draw the excess fuel back into the induction system. It is likely the flight instructor overprimed the engine, which resulted in an engine fire, and then failed to follow the POH procedure to extinguish the fire. Due to the instructor's failure to attempt to remediate the problem, the fire was not extinguished in a timely manner.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's overpriming of the engine during start, which resulted in a carburetor fire. Contributing to the severity of accident was the flight instructor's failure to follow the Pilot Operating Handbook's engine fire during start emergency procedures.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA16LA119
- Event ID
- 20160229X25457
- Case number
- ERA16LA119
- 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 2016-02-22.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 6c9e06a00e2c19f11f45de292d2767050bda22a2f4f666ee50f35e2d5d65f409; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:11:12.966Z.