WPR23LA121 · Piper PA-28-180
CFI Academy Piper PA-28-180 · Accident during initial climb
From an unrecorded airport to Lodi Airport (1O3)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR23LA121
- 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-28-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N9375J
- Operator
- CFI Academy
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Lodi Airport (1O3), Lodi, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 57 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane had recently undergone extensive maintenance; the accident flight was a return leg to the pilot’s home airport after having flown the first leg earlier in the day. The initial departure was normal, and when reaching about 300 ft above ground level (agl), the engine suddenly lost power. The pilot attempted to return to the runway, but the airplane could not maintain altitude. The pilot performed an off-airport landing, and the airplane impacted terrain.
A postaccident examination of the airplane and engine revealed no evidence of preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures. The carburetor was replaced two days before the accident; the examination did not find anomalies with the carburetor. There was no fuel found in the carburetor bowl, but it could not be determined if that was the condition at the time of impact or if the fuel system could deliver metered fuel to the engine. While the FAA's Carburetor Icing Chart revealed the probability of serious icing between cruise and glide power for the reported temperature and dew point conditions, the investigation could not conclusively determine that carburetor ice caused the loss of engine power.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR23LA121
- Event ID
- 20230307106841
- Case number
- WPR23LA121
- 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: c084563149c5f76268f1309dd016c40ec88b36f64948ce8a364fa9b5ef792ffa; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:23:49.381Z.