CEN20LA292 · Beech A23-24
Beech A23-24 · Accident: loss of engine power (partial) en route
From Elk City Regional Business Airport (ELK) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN20LA292
- 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
Beech A23-24
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 23
- 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
- N3412C
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Elk City Regional Business Airport (ELK), Elk City, OKTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 51 years (built 1969)
- 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
- Loss of engine power (partial)
- 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
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot and his 3 passengers were on a personal night flight when the airplane had a gradual loss of engine power. The pilot was unable to restore engine power and a forced landing was completed to a grass field. The airplane’s main landing gear collapsed when the pilot intentionally swerved the airplane to avoid a tree after landing, which resulted in substantial damage to the horizontal stabilizer and both wings.
A postaccident examination revealed that the throttle control rod-end was not connected to the fuel servo throttle linkage. Additionally, the required retaining bolt, washer, and self-locking nut were not located during the investigation. The airplane had accumulated 8.72 flight hours since the last annual inspection, during which the fuel servo had been removed from the engine and overhauled. It is likely that the mechanic who reinstalled the fuel servo did not adequately torque the self-locking nut that secured the retaining bolt, which allowed the self-locking nut to back-off the retaining bolt. The airplane had a partial loss of engine power when the throttle control rod-end disconnected from the unsecured retaining bolt. The pilot did not have the ability to control engine power after the throttle control rod-end disconnected from the fuel servo throttle linkage.
Probable cause
The mechanic’s improper maintenance when he reinstalled the fuel servo during the last annual inspection, which resulted in a loss of engine power during cruise flight when the throttle control rod-end disconnected from the fuel servo throttle linkage.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN20LA292
- Event ID
- 20200719X22746
- Case number
- CEN20LA292
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2020-07-19.
- API snapshot SHA-256: e64fe42ef07e98266ba3713b886ca59314b0fe3f9b9d9d2e679b386b1ed48792; retrieved 2026-09-16T12:11:28.154Z.