ERA17FA140 · Beech A36 UNDESIGNAT
Beech A36 UNDESIGNAT · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Enterprise Municipal Airport (EDN) to Upper Cumberland Regional Airport (SRB)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA17FA140
- 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
- 2 · 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
Beech A36 UNDESIGNAT
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 36
- 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
- N8169Y
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Enterprise Municipal Airport (EDN), Enterprise, ALTo Upper Cumberland Regional Airport (SRB), Sparta, TN
- Aircraft age
- About 26 years (built 1991)
- 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
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot was conducting a cross-country flight at a cruise altitude of 5,000 ft mean sea level (msl) in day visual meteorological conditions when the airplane experienced a total loss of engine power. Over the next minute, the airplane continued a northerly track before it began a turn to the west as the controller identified the closest public airport, private strip, state highway, and open areas for potential forced landing sites, which the pilot acknowledged. About 3 minutes later, the airplane collided with trees and terrain and was consumed by postcrash fire. All engine accessories were destroyed by fire and could not be examined except for the engine-driven fuel pump, which revealed no anomalies. The engine displayed internal and external thermal damage, but internally displayed signatures consistent with normal wear and lubrication. Tree damage at the site was consistent with a rotating propeller at the time of tree contact.
An NTSB performance specialist plotted potential glide ranges and trajectories for the airplane from the assumed point of engine power loss. About the time of the loss of engine power, the airplane was about 1 mile abeam an abandoned airport. This airport was not plotted on the visual flight rules sectional chart nor was it visible to the controller, and it may not have been readily visible to the pilot due to its location on the right side of the airplane. However, the airplane's projected glide distance and trajectories indicated that the airplane was within gliding distance of numerous open fields as well as a four-lane divided highway with a large grass median. It could not be determined why the pilot chose to forgo any of the potential suitable forced landing sites.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power for reasons that could not be determined due to postcrash thermal damage to the engine accessories and the airframe. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's failure to navigate to any of the available forced landing sites within gliding distance of the airplane following the loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA17FA140
- Event ID
- 20170328X53238
- Case number
- ERA17FA140
- 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: 56628e41dba94318d5741d309f407a1a11181e271de2d1c5fb073fd354607688; retrieved 2026-09-15T06:00:26.799Z.