ERA22LA217 · Cessna 172N
Old Bridge Flight School Cessna 172N · Accident: loss of engine power (total) on approach
From Old Bridge Airport (3N6) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA22LA217
- 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
Cessna 172N
- 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
- N737LY
- Operator
- Old Bridge Flight School
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Old Bridge Airport (3N6), Englishtown, NJTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 45 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
- Approach · VFR go-around
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor reported that, during an instructional flight, he told the student to set up for landing on runway 6. When they were at an altitude of about 400 ft above ground level, the flight instructor told him to apply full power since for a go-around. When the student applied full power, the engine did not respond. The flight instructor took control of the airplane and tried to land on runway 24. The flight instructor knew they would not make the runway, so he tried to land in the grass and the left wing contacted a fence and flipped the airplane over, which resulted in substantial damage to both wings, the vertical stabilizer and horizontal stabilizer. The flight instructor stated that he thought the throttle cable had become disconnected. A postaccident examination revealed that the throttle cable was not connected to the carburetor. An AN drilled bolt was found at the bottom of the cowling; however, the castellated nut was not located. Review of the maintenance logbooks revealed that the engine had been recently overhauled and installed in the airplane. Further conversations with the flight instructor, who was also the mechanic, stated that it is possible he forgot to install the cotter pin into the castellated nut and the bolt fell out.
Probable cause
Loss of engine power due to the throttle linkage becoming disconnected in flight due to improper maintenance.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA22LA217
- Event ID
- 20220503105039
- Case number
- ERA22LA217
- 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: bdf20c2685c9178379c3350f3ee8f41c6ff323e967e7821cbf291be4f7b15247; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:12:07.235Z.