ERA21LA144 · Cessna 172 N
Cessna 172 N · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Palm Beach County Park Airport (LNA) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA21LA144
- 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
- 0
- 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 172 N
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N5631E
- Operator
- Pilot Training Center
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Palm Beach County Park Airport (LNA), West Palm Beach, FLTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot was performing ground reference maneuvers at 1,000 ft when the flight instructor noticed that the airplane had descended “about 100 ft.” He advised the student pilot to climb the airplane back to the desired altitude, but the airplane did not respond to the student’s control inputs. The instructor took control of the airplane and his remedial actions failed to restore engine power, so he performed a forced landing to a dirt road between cultivated fields, which resulted in substantial damage to the airplane.
A detailed examination of the airplane and a successful postaccident engine run failed to reveal any preimpact mechanical anomalies. Although atmospheric conditions at the time of the accident were conducive to serious icing at glide power, the reason for the loss of engine power could not be determined based on the available information.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA21LA144
- Event ID
- 20210301102685
- Case number
- ERA21LA144
- 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: 9b1f5e35b61eb70bbf925bbe1e09942530cd3d12c4a93ec493adee3a3b50e98f; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:45:05.969Z.