WPR24LA271 · Piper PA-18-150
Piper PA-18-150 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR24LA271
- 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
- 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-18-150
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-18
- 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
- N8576Y
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 48 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
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The instructor pilot was giving dual instruction to a pilot-rated student. He reported that soon after departure, the airplane engine RPM reduced to idle. The pilot verified the throttle was at full power, adequate fuel was in both tanks and subsequently applied carburetor heat, which restored the engine to full power. After 10 seconds the RPM began surging and the pilot then turned the carburetor heat off. He turned the carburetor heat on again and pumped the throttle repeatedly while the power continued to surge until the engine quit and he lost all power. They were unable to restart the engine and landed the airplane in a nearby agricultural field. The airplane came to rest inverted, which resulted in substantial damage to the vertical stabilizer. The engine ran normally on the ground after the airplane was returned to its upright position following the accident. When the temperature and the dewpoint near the time of the accident were plotted on a carburetor icing probability graph, it was revealed that the airplane was likely operating in meteorological conditions conducive to the formation of carburetor icing (for glide power settings). The pilot reported that there were no preaccident mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power due to carburetor icing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR24LA271
- Event ID
- 20240812194908
- Case number
- WPR24LA271
- 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: 7b168bf4c9bc2df1e3b9b129eb89131a998106167a81efb241a076d652491182; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:09:34.650Z.