WPR19LA016 · Cessna T210 G
Cessna T210 G · Accident: loss of engine power (total) during initial climb
From Santa Paula Airport (SZP) to Bakersfield International Airport (L45)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR19LA016
- 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
Cessna T210 G
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- 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
- N6834R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Santa Paula Airport (SZP), Santa Paula, CATo Bakersfield International Airport (L45), Bakersfield, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 52 years (built 1966)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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 power plant
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot stated that, after a normal departure, he climbed the airplane to a cruise altitude about 4,000 ft mean sea level (msl) and configured it for cruise flight. Thereafter, the engine experienced a sudden total loss of power. Despite his attempts to troubleshoot the failure, he could not restart the engine and performed a forced landing in a dry riverbed. After touchdown, the nose landing gear impacted a rock and collapsed, and the airplane nosed over and came to rest inverted.
Examination revealed a cloth towel blocking the turbocharger inlet tube that had become entangled with the turbocharger compressor wheel. The towel likely blocked the inlet air from reaching the cylinders, which resulted in a loss of engine power. The pilot stated that during the last oil change, about 34 flight hours before the accident, he removed the airbox and placed a towel in the inlet scat tubing (not disconnected) in an effort to protect the turbocharger from foreign object damage.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power as a result of the pilot’s failure to remove a towel from the engine’s air induction following maintenance.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR19LA016
- Event ID
- 20181028X02003
- Case number
- WPR19LA016
- 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, cause areas. 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: dba0b5e33551afb46ee8e0bd1268ba9e8ed704c615e96dee15994bdfb950cdb1; retrieved 2026-09-16T08:23:19.628Z.