Lake Clark Air Stinson 10A accident
Stinson 10A · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From PORT ALSWORTH, AK to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC99LA015
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
Stinson 10A
- Aircraft type
- Stinson 10
- 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
- N36755
- Operator
- Lake Clark Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From PORT ALSWORTH, AKTo not recorded
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- 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
- Total loss of engine power (non-mechanical)
- 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
- 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
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › Operation with known deficiencies in equipment, continued
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The certificated commercial pilot, and the sole passenger, departed for an on-demand air taxi flight over remote terrain. The passenger was conducting moose counting research for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The airplane carried four hours of fuel divided between two wing mounted fuel tanks. Each fuel tank is equipped with an electric fuel gauge. After flying for two hours with the left fuel tank selected, the fuel in the left tank was almost exhausted, and the pilot switched to the right fuel tank. He then flew for about 1.5 hours on the right tank before the engine suddenly quit. The pilot switched back to the left tank and climbed to about 1,000 feet above the ground. After about 6 minutes on the left tank, the engine quit running again. The pilot selected an emergency landing area on a small, frozen pond. The surface of the pond contained slushy ice and drifted snow. During the landing roll, the airplane entered deep snow and nosed over. The passenger reported she flew in the accident airplane two days before the accident. During that flight, she noticed the right fuel gauge in the airplane was inoperative. During the accident flight, two days later, she again noticed the right fuel gauge was still inoperative. Following recovery of the airplane, evidence of fuel staining was observed on the upper surface of the right wing, adjacent to the right fuel cap.
Probable cause
The pilot's continued operation of the airplane with known deficiencies, a failure of company maintenance personnel to replace an inoperative fuel gauge, and subsequent fuel exhaustion. Factors in the accident were siphoning of fuel from the right wing fuel cap, and slush covered terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC99LA015
- Event ID
- 20001211X11506
- Case number
- ANC99LA015
- 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: 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: e13b1d39b1a9d40d5b74980da8daf82bdbb6701384a41d2c97cd2f5c895976ca; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:01:59.069Z.