CHI95FA337 · Cessna T210R
Cessna T210R · Accident: loss of engine power on approach
From Tulsa Riverside Airport (RVS) to Iowa City Municipal Airport (IOW)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI95FA337
- 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
- 1 · 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 T210R
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- 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
- N650GM
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tulsa Riverside Airport (RVS), Tulsa, OKTo Iowa City Municipal Airport (IOW)
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern downwind
- First occurrenceThe 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
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Fuel exhaustion; Tree(s); Wire, transmission
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › Lack of familiarity with aircraft
- Pilot in command › Preflight planning/preparation, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The day before the accident, the airplane had flown from Newton, KS to Oklahoma City, OK, then to Shawnee, OK, and return to Newton, KS. It was not refueled. That same day, the operator made a business arrangement with the passengers to have them flown round trip from Tulsa, OK, to Iowa City, IA. The operator contacted the pilot requesting that he fly the Cessna 210. The pilot accepted although he had never flown a Cessna 210. The next day, after a 1/2-hour checkout at Newton, KS, the pilot flew to Tulsa, OK to pick up the passengers. While approaching Tulsa, the pilot reported that the fuel gauges indicated empty. The refuelers were told to top off the fuel tanks. The refueler put on 48.8 gals of fuel; the airplane held 120 gals total fuel. A passenger paid for the fuel. The pilot did not see the fuel slip nor did he learn that 48.8 gals of fuel had been added. The pilot did not visually check the fuel level during preflight. The pilot reported that he did not believe the fuel gauges were reliable. After 2.6 hours of flight, the airplane impacted trees and power lines 1/2 mile north of Iowa City Airport. There was no indication of fuel on the airplane, nor were there indications of fuel siphoning or leaking.
Probable cause
fuel exhaustion as a result of the pilot's inadequate preflight and lack of familiarity with the airplane. Factors involved were the bright night, trees and transmission wires.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI95FA337
- Event ID
- 20001207X04442
- Case number
- CHI95FA337
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1995-09-28.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 62ac29a6b596a777ae558342c9a014472d2bfb7eb42107ea9f2dfd7d80d01736; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:35:13.889Z.