CEN22LA186 · Piper PA32R 301
Piper PA32R 301 · Accident: system/component malfunction/failure (non-power) en route
From Huntingburg Airport (HNB) to Putnam County Airport (GPC)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN22LA186
- 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 PA32R 301
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA32
- 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
- N4303P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Huntingburg Airport (HNB), Huntingburg, INTo Putnam County Airport (GPC), Greencastle, IN
- Aircraft age
- About 39 years (built 1983)
- 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
- 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 systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that about 10 minutes after departure the engine sustained a partial loss of power. During the forced landing to a gravel road, the airplane’s left wing contacted a tree, which resulted in substantial damage. A postaccident engine test run was performed, and the engine would not produce rated power, so the fuel servo was removed for testing. Functional testing and examination of the fuel servo revealed that it would not deliver fuel to rated specifications due to a self-locking nut being stuck inside the top section of the plug. This resulted in the head idle spring not properly allowing fuel to flow through the ball valve. The engine and fuel servo had both surpassed the manufacturers’ established time between overhauls by 572 hours.
Probable cause
The inadequate maintenance and subsequent failure of an internal component in the fuel servo that prevented adequate fuel flow to the engine, which resulted in a partial loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN22LA186
- Event ID
- 20220502105024
- Case number
- CEN22LA186
- 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: 874dd49fb4c2fe68bf39bead2b68d919100e868105f5c98c75314a2159e7ae7e; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:11:25.996Z.