CEN18LA036 · Piper PA 28-180
Piper PA 28-180 · Accident: fuel related on approach
From Fairfield County Airport (LHQ) to Fairfield County Airport (LHQ)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN18LA036
- 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 PA 28-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N10GJ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fairfield County Airport (LHQ), Lancaster, OHTo Fairfield County Airport (LHQ), Lancaster, OH
- Aircraft age
- About 45 years (built 1972)
- 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 base
- 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
- Fuel related
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot was conducting a personal flight to practice takeoffs and landings. The pilot stated that the airplane's engine lost total power while he was preparing to land. His attempt to restart the engine was unsuccessful. The airplane did not have sufficient altitude to reach the airport, so the pilot performed a forced landing into a field, resulting in substantial damage to the airplane's left wing.
A postaccident examination of the airplane found that it had adequate fuel and that the airplane's electrical and mechanical fuel pumps were capable of delivering fuel. An engine ground run showed that the engine was capable of running.
The temperature and dew point at the time of the accident were favorable for serious carburetor icing at any power setting. The pilot stated that, just before the loss of engine power, he applied carburetor heat in preparation for landing. On the basis of the available evidence, it is likely that the engine lost power after developing carburetor ice and that the application of carburetor heat was ineffective and had possibly exacerbated the problem by introducing hot, less dense air, which could further upset the fuel-air ratio. The pilot might have been unaware of the developing carburetor ice because the formation of ice would reduce rpm but might not result in rough engine operation. Thus, the reduction in rpm could have gone unnoticed given the normal engine power setting changes when the airplane was in the traffic pattern.
Probable cause
The total loss of engine power due to carburetor icing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN18LA036
- Event ID
- 20171122X13300
- Case number
- CEN18LA036
- 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, coordinates. 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: e3c5b72cad2a18eae7872c072a5104e6af87d674d62651d596e69cd1149fd8ac; retrieved 2026-09-16T06:01:26.509Z.