ERA20LA161 · Keuthan Aircraft Corp Buccaneer II
Keuthan Aircraft Corp Buccaneer II · Accident: fuel related en route
From Foley, AL (no airport) to Foley, AL (no airport)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA20LA161
- 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
Keuthan Aircraft Corp Buccaneer II
- Aircraft type
- Keuthan BUCCANEER
- 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
- N43310
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Foley, AL (no airport)To Foley, AL (no airport)
- Aircraft age
- About 26 years (built 1994)
- 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
- 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
- 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 as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot, who owned the airplane, was making a local personal flight from his private grass strip. During the first 1 hour 15-minute of flight, the engine performance was normal. Then, while about 800 ft above the ground (agl), the engine began to lose power and rpm started a slow continuous drop. The pilot moved the throttle to full power, but the engine continued to lose power. About 150 ft agl, the engine lost power completely and the pilot attempted to glide to a small island. About 25 ft agl, the right wing stalled and the airplane impacted power lines then terrain. Postaccident examination of the wreckage revealed no evidence of preimpact mechanical anomalies that would have prevented normal engine operation, and the engine was run successfully at various power settings. The weather conditions at the time of the accident were conducive to the formation of serious carburetor icing at glide (idle) engine power settings. The airplane was not equipped with carburetor heat, contrary to the engine’s installation manual, which stated "operation in climatic conditions, where carburetor icing is likely to occur, a heating system must be fitted."
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power due to carburetor icing. Contributing to the accident was the lack of a carburetor heat system installed on the engine.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA20LA161
- Event ID
- 20200427X65715
- Case number
- ERA20LA161
- 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: 00f7fe183f008bdd93190ffd84a27e605e9848f42c9ab004d1d0736658b6a687; retrieved 2026-09-16T11:31:38.347Z.