American Aviation Cessna U206F accident
Cessna U206F · Accident: powerplant system/component malfunction/failure en route
From Page Municipal Airport (PGA) to Page Municipal Airport (PGA)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR17LA144
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
Cessna U206F
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 206
- 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
- N71001
- Operator
- American Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Page Municipal Airport (PGA), Page, AZTo Page Municipal Airport (PGA), Page, AZ
- Aircraft age
- About 44 years (built 1973)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot, who was the pilot flying, reported that, while he, the copilot, and four passengers were returning to the airport following a sightseeing flight and while the airplane was at 7,500 ft, it would no longer climb. The airplane then slowly started to descend about 350 ft per minute. Unable to stop the descent, the pilots attempted to troubleshoot the problem but were unable to regain engine power. The pilot initiated a precautionary landing onto a dirt road. When the airplane was about 125 ft above ground level, the copilot took control of the airplane and landed it on the road. During the landing roll, the left wing impacted bushes before coming to rest. As the pilots retarded the throttle to idle, the throttle and about 2 ft of the throttle control cable came out of the control panel.
Metallurgical examination of the throttle cable wires revealed flat fracture surfaces that were perpendicular to the wires' axes, and no evidence of necking or other deformation was found, which is consistent with a progressive fracture mechanism, such as fatigue. Therefore, the throttle control cable likely failed due to fatigue and resulted in the pilots' inability to control the engine power.
A review of the airplane's maintenance logbooks revealed that the throttle control cable was installed more than 20 years before the accident. The airplane maintenance manual indicated that the engine controls, including the throttle control cable, should be replaced at every engine overhaul. The operator reported that the last engine overhaul was completed 163 hours before the accident. The logbooks did not indicate that the throttle control cable had been replaced during the overhaul. Given the evidence, maintenance personnel likely failed to replace the throttle control cable at the last engine overhaul, which led to the cable fracturing in flight due to fatigue and the subsequent inability of the pilots to control the engine power.
Probable cause
The failure of the throttle control cable due to fatigue and maintenance personnel’s failure to replace the cable at the last engine overhaul, which resulted in the pilots’ inability to control engine power and led to a precautionary landing during which the airplane impacted bushes.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR17LA144
- Event ID
- 20170624X85327
- Case number
- WPR17LA144
- 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: cdbfc94f6285c1e6ddb7f94ae14b7b170d1bf55bb6b2d748c424c3d08b471122; retrieved 2026-09-16T05:27:11.289Z.