ERA22LA323 · Allan G Pixley THATCHER CX4
Allan G Pixley THATCHER CX4 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Skypark Estates Owners Assoc Airport (18FD) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA22LA323
- 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
Allan G Pixley THATCHER CX4
- Aircraft type
- Allan G Pixley THATCHER CX4
- 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
- N347CX
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Skypark Estates Owners Assoc Airport (18FD), Baker, FLTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 9 years (built 2013)
- 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
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that he had just completed an overhaul of the automotive conversion engine that was installed in the experimental amateur-built airplane. Before the day of the accident, the pilot conducted several engine ground runs. During most of the ground runs, the engine would not run smoothly when at the idle throttle setting; however, on the last ground run, the engine ran smoothly at idle. On the day of the accident, the pilot planned to break in the engine during a flight over the airport. After takeoff, while the airplane was climbing to traffic pattern altitude, the pilot felt something dripping onto his leg and decided to perform a precautionary landing. When he pulled the throttle back to idle to initiate a descent, the engine stopped producing power. Unable to restore power to the engine, he elected to execute a forced landing, during which the left wing impacted a tree. Although the pilot did not run the engine after the accident, his postaccident examination of the engine revealed no anomaly that would have precluded normal operation. The atmospheric conditions at the time of the accident were conducive to carburetor icing at glide power; however, the airplane’s engine was at a climb power setting before the pilot reduced the throttle to idle to initiate the descent. Therefore, it is not likely that the loss of engine power was the result of carburetor ice. Since the pilot had just completed an overhaul of the engine and the engine would not run smoothly at idle during several engine ground runs, it is likely that the engine idle setting was misadjusted, which resulted in the engine losing power when the throttle was reduced to idle.
Probable cause
The improper engine idle setting, which resulted in a total loss of engine power when the pilot reduced the throttle to idle to initiate a descent.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA22LA323
- Event ID
- 20220720105528
- Case number
- ERA22LA323
- 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: ed929f441b5cd7f7a30a22aca65250e2c82721e207065bf05c2628cf62694217; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:28:57.510Z.