CEN22LA313 · Piper PA-24-260
Piper PA-24-260 · Accident en route
From Rapid City Regional Airport (KRAP) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN22LA313
- 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-24-260
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-24
- 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
- N478WT
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Rapid City Regional Airport (KRAP), Rapid City, SDTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 56 years (built 1966)
- 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
- Unknown or undetermined
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that, shortly after departure, about 6,000 ft above mean sea level, the engine lost all power. He declared an emergency with air traffic control and stated that he needed to return to the airport. He subsequently switched fuel tanks and attempted multiple engine restarts, but power could not be restored. Unable to reach the runway, he performed a forced landing to a field, during which the airplane bounced, the right main landing gear collapsed, and the airplane slid until it came to rest upright, which resulted in substantial damage to the elevator. Following the accident, fuel was drained from the left and right main fuel tanks as well as the right auxiliary fuel tank. When the left auxiliary fuel tank was checked, no fuel was present. No contaminants were found in any of the fuel samples. The pilot stated that he departed with an estimated 68 gallons of fuel on board, after adding about 60 gallons in the main fuel tanks. The wreckage was sold before it could be examined by the National Transportation Safety Board; therefore, the reason for the loss of engine power could not be determined.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power for reasons that could not be determined because the airplane was unavailable for examination.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN22LA313
- Event ID
- 20220711105449
- Case number
- CEN22LA313
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2022-07-11.
- API snapshot SHA-256: ae35c9ddf3176b03b2b4d15c8fd50de89bccba8cc0ca251dfc09822e56886b3a; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:26:30.033Z.