CEN18LA356 · Air Tractor AT 301
Ag Air Service Air Tractor AT 301 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Hutchinson Municipal Airport (HUT) to Hutchinson Municipal Airport (HUT)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN18LA356
- 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
Air Tractor AT 301
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor AT-301
- 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
- N3164K
- Operator
- Ag Air Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Hutchinson Municipal Airport (HUT), Hutchinson, KSTo Hutchinson Municipal Airport (HUT), Hutchinson, KS
- Aircraft age
- About 34 years (built 1984)
- 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot reported that he had been flying for about 1 hour and was returning to the airport when the engine lost total power while the airplane was about 1,000 ft above ground level (agl). Although the engine momentarily regained power twice, for about 3 seconds each time when he used the manual fuel pump, the airplane continued to lose altitude. He attempted to land on a road but was unable to properly align the airplane's flightpath with the road. The airplane stalled about 20 ft agl, contacted the road, and bounced before coming to rest in an adjacent field, which resulted in substantial damage to the left wing. A postaccident engine examination did not reveal any evidence of preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The total loss of engine power for reasons that could not be determined based on the available evidence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN18LA356
- Event ID
- 20180829X53319
- Case number
- CEN18LA356
- 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: a3a750da2c7a6af020b3127e4e75abfcb673efbacca4dfbe7fe3d5101d28b577; retrieved 2026-09-16T08:10:35.307Z.