CEN21LA211 · Piper PA-28-161
Hoffman Aviation Services Piper PA-28-161 · Accident: fire/smoke (non-impact) while standing
From David Wayne Hooks Memorial Airport (DWH) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN21LA211
- 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
Piper PA-28-161
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N54MC
- Operator
- Hoffman Aviation Services
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From David Wayne Hooks Memorial Airport (DWH), Spring, TXTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 44 years (built 1977)
- 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
- Standing · engine(s) start-up
- 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
- Fire/smoke (non-impact)
- 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and student pilot were landing the airplane during an instructional flight when they noticed a loss of engine power during landing rollout. After exiting the runway, the flight instructor was able to restart the engine on the second attempt. The pilots subsequently noticed that an engine fire had developed, shut down the engine, and exited the airplane. The fire substantially damaged the engine mount and firewall before it could be extinguished.
The flight crew turned the electric fuel pump on before landing in accordance with normal operating procedure, and the flight instructor did not turn it off before exiting the airplane [as called for by the emergency procedure for an engine fire]. Postaccident examination revealed that with the electric fuel pump turned on, fuel leaked from the carburetor into the air box. The carburetor was disassembled with no anomalies observed. The fuel leaking from the carburetor was likely due to the electric fuel pump over-pressurizing the carburetor needle/seat assembly, which allowed the carburetor bowl to overfill. The leaking fuel likely came in contact with hot exhaust pipes and ignited, which resulted in the engine fire.
Probable cause
An engine fire that resulted from a fuel leak into the carburetor air box due to the electric fuel pump over-pressurizing the carburetor needle/seat assembly. Contributing to the severity of the fire was the flight instructor’s failure to turn off the electric fuel pump before exiting the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN21LA211
- Event ID
- 20210510103051
- Case number
- CEN21LA211
- 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: 6bf6988e534f434574e2257e8a42700afb4b7813327e36b8cca04b8958f2b647; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:01:24.778Z.