WPR21LA173 · Flight Design Gmbh CTSW
Flight Design Gmbh CTSW · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Santa Fe Municipal Airport (SAF) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR21LA173
- 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
Flight Design Gmbh CTSW
- Aircraft type
- Flight Design CTSW
- 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
- N378CT
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Santa Fe Municipal Airport (SAF), Santa Fe, NMTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 15 years (built 2006)
- 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
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- 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
On an instructional flight, a flight instructor and the pilot receiving instruction practiced touch and go landing maneuvers and were en route back to their destination. The pilot noticed the oil pressure had decreased and positioned the airplane to fly over a suitable landing environment. However, the oil pressure continued to decrease and when the pressure reached about 4 psi, the engine abruptly stopped. Subsequently, the flight instructor made a forced landing on a dirt field. During the ground roll, the nose wheel struck a rock and the airplane nosed over. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed a leak in the oil line supplying oil to the engine. The leak in the oil line likely led to the loss of oil during flight and resulted in the abrupt loss of engine power. The damage to the oil line was consistent with heat damage, which was likely a result of it having been routed too close to the exhaust manifold.
Probable cause
A leak in the oil line that supplied the engine with oil, which resulted in oil exhaustion and the total loss of engine power. Contributing to the accident was the routing of the oil line to close to the exhaust manifold.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR21LA173
- Event ID
- 20210422102964
- Case number
- WPR21LA173
- 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: 5ac9b03d5f7089070946172ad06c3022c88a259b44ff5bb7ed2d9a635fb55b91; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:58:46.113Z.