ERA22LA054 · Piper PA28 151
Cirrus Aviation Piper PA28 151 · Accident: system/component malfunction/failure (non-power) on approach
From Sebring Regional Airport (SEF) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA22LA054
- 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
Piper PA28 151
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA28
- 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
- N40831
- Operator
- Cirrus Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sebring Regional Airport (SEF), Sebring, FLTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 48 years (built 1973)
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern base
- 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
- System/component malfunction/failure (non-power)
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot was turning from downwind to base in the traffic pattern, with 10° flap extension, when he noticed that the throttle lever was stuck with the engine operating at 2,000 rpm. He turned onto final approach with 25° flap extension and realized that the descent rate was too great and that the airplane was not going to make it to the runway. He retracted the flaps to 0° to reduce drag, turned right to avoid houses at the approach end of the runway, and landed the airplane in an adjacent bay.
Metallurgical examination of the throttle cable revealed a worn Teflon liner. When intact, the liner supported the inner cable and prevented metal-to-metal contact with the helical coil of the cable housing. Six of the seven wires of the inner cable had separated due to metal-to-metal contact wear. The seventh (single central) wire did not have the capacity to resist compressive and torsional loading of the cable, which led to collapse and torsional unfurling of the cable.
The airplane was manufactured 48 years before the accident and had accrued about 14,000 hours of operation. There were no life-limited components on the make and model airplane and no requirement to replace the throttle cable at a scheduled interval. Review of maintenance records dating back 2 years before the accident did not reveal any problems with the throttle.
Probable cause
A partial loss of engine power due to a failed throttle cable.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA22LA054
- Event ID
- 20211110104230
- Case number
- ERA22LA054
- 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: 3b30e75ccab1a3dad1ae9bdc3b7bf947be39b55084399acc2df3ab03a1c498bd; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:44:12.863Z.