ERA17LA165 · Ganjoo Amit SONEX
Ganjoo Amit SONEX · Accident: loss of engine power (total) on approach
From Leesburg Executive Airport (JYO) to Blue Ridge Airport (MTV)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA17LA165
- 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
Ganjoo Amit SONEX
- Aircraft type
- Ganjoo Amit SONEX
- 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
- N212AG
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Leesburg Executive Airport (JYO), Leesburg, VATo Blue Ridge Airport (MTV), Martinsville, VA
- Aircraft age
- Built the same year (2017)
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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 systems
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot checked the weather conditions before departure for the personal flight, and he noted that it was drizzling but that the cloud/ceilings were "good." Once airborne, the weather conditions began to deteriorate, and the pilot chose to return to the airport. The pilot added that, while the airplane was on final approach to land at 700 ft above ground level (agl), the engine "just stopped." The pilot attempted to restart the engine to no avail, and he subsequently initiated a forced landing just short of the runway. The pilot said that the airplane "ran out of airspeed" when it was about 100 ft agl and that it then landed hard and slid about 100 ft before coming to a stop.
Postaccident examination of the engine revealed no evidence of any preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. Weather conditions reported at the time of the accident were conducive for serious icing at cruise power. The pilot acknowledged that the weather conditions were conducive to carburetor icing but that he did not apply carburetor heat until he tried to restart the engine, and even then, that he did not use full carburetor heat. Therefore, it is likely that carburetor ice accumulated during the flight, which resulted in a total loss of engine power.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to use carburetor heat appropriately, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to the formation of carburetor ice.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA17LA165
- Event ID
- 20170422X03928
- Case number
- ERA17LA165
- 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: bc4dfcf1e50ccf9806bdf02b05918d52621229d5bdee29e0d4a99ca8181809e2; retrieved 2026-09-16T05:11:28.244Z.