ERA25LA346 · Piper PA-24-180
Piper PA-24-180 · Accident: loss of engine power (partial) en route
From St Charles County Regional Airport/Smartt Field (SET) to John C Tune Airport (JWN)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA25LA346
- 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
- Ongoing
- 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-24-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-24
- 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
- N5759P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From St Charles County Regional Airport/Smartt Field (SET), St. Charles, MOTo John C Tune Airport (JWN), Nashville, TN
- Aircraft age
- About 66 years (built 1959)
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On September 5, 2025, at 1645 central daylight time, N5759P, a Piper Cherokee PA-24-180, sustained substantial damage when it was involved in an accident near Ashland City, Tennessee. The private pilot sustained minor injuries. The flight was conducted as a Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 personal flight. The pilot stated that he departed the St. Charles County Regional Airport/Smartt Field (SET), St. Charles, Missouri, about 1500, and was destined for John C. Thune Airport (JWN), Nashville, Tennessee. He said that as he was preparing the airplane for his arrival at JWN, he twisted the mixture control knob to the full rich position. While doing so, the engine began to run rough and lose power. The pilot contacted air traffic control, and used the Emergency Checklist to troubleshoot the loss of power. He said, “I put the fuel boost pump on, switched tanks, verified ignition was on, verified the mixture full rich, turned carb heat on and verified that the primer was in and locked. I observed about 1000 RPM and 3 GPH on the fuel totalizer. The engine felt like it was idle and unresponsive to throttle inputs.” The pilot was unable to maintain altitude and made a forced landing to a cornfield, which resulted in substantial damage to the fuselage. The airplane was recovered from the cornfield and taken to a secure facility for further examination.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA25LA346
- Event ID
- 20250915201003
- Case number
- ERA25LA346
- 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. 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: 35d0f6b654f2682975c541b828c6b1a083250bf7d6e99739b08d1da364fe983f; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:20:25.483Z.