ERA20LA320 · Stinson 108 2
Stinson 108 2 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Joseph A. Hardy Connellsville Airport (VVS) to Blairstown Airport (1N7)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA20LA320
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
Stinson 108 2
- Aircraft type
- Stinson 108
- 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
- N336C
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Joseph A. Hardy Connellsville Airport (VVS), Connellsville, PATo Blairstown Airport (1N7), Blairstown, NJ
- Aircraft age
- About 73 years (built 1947)
- 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 (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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor stated that he and the pilot fueled the airplane, departed, and flew for about 1.5 hours when, while cruising at 3,500 ft, the engine “started to sputter.” He checked the magnetos, adjusted the mixture, switched fuel tanks, and pumped the primer and throttle. When he pumped the primer, the engine would “run for about 5 seconds then quit,” and the propeller continued to windmill. Unable to restore power to the engine, he elected to execute a forced landing to a field. During the landing rollout, the airplane impacted a berm resulting in substantial damage to the fuselage. Postaccident examination of the engine revealed that although the cockpit mixture knob was set to full rich, the carburetor mixture control cable was disconnected at the carburetor and the carburetor mixture lever on the carburetor was in idle cutoff position. The hardware that would have attached these components was not located. Given this information, it is likely that hardware holding the mixture control cable to the mixture control arm loosened and departed during flight, allowing the disconnected mixture control arm to migrate to the cut-off position, resulting in a total loss of engine power. Since both the accelerator pump and the primer system bypass the carburetor and delivers some fuel directly to the engine even when the mixture control is in the “cutoff” position, this would explain why the instructor reported momentary bursts of power when he pumped the primer or throttle.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power during cruise flight due to a disconnected carburetor mixture control cable which allowed the carburetor mixture lever to migrate to the cut-off position during flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA20LA320
- Event ID
- 20200917X44724
- Case number
- ERA20LA320
- 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: 280c9475560ba4ee3cc5c25792b49929effe7290b1183e29e1ee6e2c21b84b64; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:03:30.460Z.