WPR16IA100 · Piper PA28 200
Piper PA28 200 · Incident: system/component malfunction/failure (non-power) during initial climb
From San Carlos Airport (SQL) to Byron Airport (C83)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR16IA100
- 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
- Incident
- 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 200
- 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
- N200KR
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From San Carlos Airport (SQL), San Carlos, CATo Byron Airport (C83), Byron, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 40 years (built 1976)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- System/component malfunction/failure (non-power)
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- None
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 flight instructor reported that he and the pilot receiving instruction departed normally and climbed to an altitude of 1,000 ft above ground level. The pilot completed the after-takeoff checklist and attempted to reduce engine power to a climb power setting; however, the engine was unresponsive to throttle inputs. The pilots returned to the airport, pulled the mixture control to the idle cut-off position when the airplane was over the runway threshold, and landed uneventfully. Examination of the throttle control revealed that the cable had broken.
Metallurgical examination showed that the cable was fractured due to fatigue near the input end. Fatigue regions on the wires covered about half the cross-section, consistent with a relatively high stress load on the cable. An elastomeric boot covers the swivel joints at each end of the cable assembly; however, examination revealed that the boot at the input end swivel joint had displaced onto the swivel tube. The boot at the input end lacked the same deformation as the boot at the output end, which indicated that the input end boot had not been installed on the swivel joint for some time before the event. As this boot is used to dampen vibrational loads on the cable assembly, it is likely that the cable fractured from fatigue cracks that initiated and grew due to the excessive vibrations that resulted from the missing boot on the swivel joint.
Probable cause
The failure of maintenance personnel to properly install and secure the input swivel boot on the swivel joint, which resulted in excessive vibration that led to fatigue cracks and failure of the throttle cable.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR16IA100
- Event ID
- 20160505X40535
- Case number
- WPR16IA100
- 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, damage. 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: 6850084c1b5e8f774e70eaa58ac8e9b7d627c511498b00f2bad77c4c5aab6698; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:21:20.741Z.