ERA23LA372 · Cessna 182P
Cessna 182P · Accident: loss of engine power (partial) en route
From Tuscaloosa National Airport (TCL) to Lebanon Municipal Airport (M54)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA23LA372
- 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
Cessna 182P
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N8443M
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tuscaloosa National Airport (TCL), Tuscaloosa, ALTo Lebanon Municipal Airport (M54), Lebanon, TN
- Aircraft age
- About 47 years (built 1976)
- 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 · cruise
- 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 (partial)
- 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 was performing a cross-country flight whenthere was a “sudden severe engine vibration and loss of power.” He reduced the throttle in an attempt to lessen the engine vibration and elected to land the airplane in a soybean field since he was unsure if he could clear a large, forested area between him and the next closest airport. After touchdown, the nose landing gear struck a ditch, separated, and the airplane nosed over, coming to rest inverted. An examination of the engine after the accident revealed the No. 6 cylinder exhaust valve rocker boss was fractured and loose inside the rocker cover. The boss was fractured in two places. Metallurgical examination revealed one of the fractured bosses failed from fatigue that initiated at multiple sites along the bore surface that had been in contact with the rocker arm. A review of the maintenance logbooks revealed that the engine cylinders were removed, overhauled, and reinstalled about 3 years and 4 months before the accident, and the airplane had accrued about 154 hours total time since the cylinders were overhauled.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to the fatigue failure of the No. 6 cylinder exhaust valve rocker boss.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA23LA372
- Event ID
- 20230915193069
- Case number
- ERA23LA372
- 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: b40214be7ad4329b49be1007094a773c8eb464f09a80b2529eb35a1bd8103b3f; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:07:25.434Z.