CEN20LA291 · Cessna 140 A
Cessna 140 A · Accident: loss of engine power (partial) en route
From Arlington Municipal Airport (GKY) to Fort Worth Spinks Airport (FWS)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN20LA291
- 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 140 A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 140
- 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
- N140AB
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Arlington Municipal Airport (GKY), Arlington, TXTo Fort Worth Spinks Airport (FWS), Fort Worth, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 69 years (built 1951)
- 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 · climb to 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor reported that he and the student pilot departed on a cross-country flight. The airplane's engine performed as expected during the run up, and the student pilot set the carburetor heat on cold for takeoff and departed without issues.
About 2 minutes into the flight, the engine started to run a "little bit rough and shaky." The instructor pulled the carburetor heat on about 10% hot and left it in this position in accordance with his training in this airplane. The engine roughness disappeared, and the airplane kept climbing at the same rate. About 1 minute after this event, the roughness returned more severe this time. The instructor pulled the carburetor heat all the way on to full hot and waited. The roughness continued. The power available did not allow the airplane to continue the climb at the same rate and subsequently was not sufficient to keep a level flight attitude at 1,200 ft. There was no suitable area ahead for about the next 8 to 10 miles to perform an off-field emergency landing so the instructor elected to turn back to the departure airport. He was not confident that the airplane could maintain altitude in the traffic pattern, so he elected to land on a closer runway with a quartering tailwind. As the airplane slowed down during the landing roll, he retracted the flaps to remove any residual lift and applied the yoke "slightly diving" away from the wind. While the airplane was still moving forward at a low ground speed, the nose "suddenly" yawed very "quickly and strongly" to the right. The instructor pilot applied ailerons, elevators, and full left rudder and brake, but these did not stop the yaw. The airplane subsequently ground looped and came to rest in the grass resulting in substantial damage to the aft fuselage and tailwheel.
Using the pilot's reported departure weather, the plotted relative humidity was about 80%. Review of an icing probability chart revealed that the weather conditions at the time of the accident were "conducive to serious icing at glide power."
The operator of the airplane was asked to run the engine after the accident. The operator reported the engine started and operated "normally."
The airplane's engine likely encountered carburetor icing conditions during the climb, which resulted in a partial loss of engine power and forced landing where the flight instructor was not able to maintain directional control during the roll out.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain directional control during a forced landing with a quartering tailwind, following a partial loss of engine power due to carburetor icing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN20LA291
- Event ID
- 20200719X23732
- Case number
- CEN20LA291
- 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: b6645ed8a26a5c93226353d44143b7f051719cbcd7cc1569a68706ba27b19da1; retrieved 2026-09-16T12:11:40.094Z.