ERA23LA118 · Piper PA28 180
Raleigh Flying Club Piper PA28 180 · Accident: fire/smoke (non-impact) while standing
From an unrecorded airport to Henderson Oxford Airport (HNZ)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA23LA118
- 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 180
- 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
- N747PK
- Operator
- Raleigh Flying Club
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Henderson Oxford Airport (HNZ), Oxford, NC
- Aircraft age
- About 55 years (built 1968)
- 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
- Standing · engine(s) start-up
- 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
- Fire/smoke (non-impact)
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot and his passenger prepared for a night flight in the flying club’s airplane to maintain the pilot’s currency. He tried to start the engine three times, priming the engine a total of 11 times, and “pumping” the throttle during one attempt, but it did not start. Concerned that he may have flooded the engine, he waited 5 minutes before attempting another start with full throttle and mixture at idle/cutoff. After this attempt, the passenger noted smoke and he realized that the engine was on fire. He told his passenger to egress and attempted to extinguish the fire with the onboard fire extinguisher; however, the fire substantially damaged the airplane’s the fuselage, engine mounts, and firewall. The pilot reported no mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. The Pilot’s Operating Handbook for the airplane suggested priming 1 to 3 times before engine start.
Probable cause
The pilot's flooding the engine with fuel during a cold engine start, which resulted in an engine fire.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA23LA118
- Event ID
- 20230127106640
- Case number
- ERA23LA118
- 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: 5ad22b795b9332066833b27e1e44f90655445a50f327e71efdbd19a69fd6ca9b; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:16:59.863Z.