WPR20LA180 · Bellanca 7KCAB
Boeing Employees Flying Assoc Bellanca 7KCAB · Accident: loss of engine power (total) during initial climb
From Renton Municipal Airport (RNT) to Renton Municipal Airport (RNT)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR20LA180
- 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
Bellanca 7KCAB
- Aircraft type
- Bellanca 7
- 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
- N36339
- Operator
- Boeing Employees Flying Assoc
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Renton Municipal Airport (RNT), Renton, WATo Renton Municipal Airport (RNT), Renton, WA
- Aircraft age
- About 47 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 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane had recently undergone an annual inspection, and the accident flight was the first flight since being out of maintenance. After making a normal departure and touch-and-go landing, the pilot receiving instruction applied full power. As the airplane reached an altitude of about 400 feet above ground level (agl), the engine abruptly stopped producing (total) power. The airplane could not maintain level altitude and during the subsequent off-airport landing, the airplane was substantially damaged when it collided with a tree.
Postaccident examination revealed that the air induction box contained a piece of bunched up paper that likely restricted the inlet cavity. As part of the annual inspection, a repair person completed a small fiberglass patch and painting on the lower cowling. He could not recall the specific repair on the airplane but said he often placed paper in the induction to prevent debris from entering the engine. After the maintenance, the airplane sat for a day with the lower cowling not fastened but maintenance personnel did not recognize the blockage. They also did not find the paper during the post-maintenance inspections and returned the airplane into service with an unsafe condition.
Probable cause
Maintenance personnel’s inadequate post-maintenance inspections that resulted in the total loss of engine power due to a blockage in the air intake.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR20LA180
- Event ID
- 20200612X43241
- Case number
- WPR20LA180
- 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, 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: e59b638e6e358cc390f8f1b2251fe21fa6169a2161f172c66c204bb196bf8246; retrieved 2026-09-16T11:50:18.978Z.