DEN99FA071 · Mooney M20E
Mooney M20E · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) on approach
From 6V6 · Nucla, CO to Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN99FA071
- 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
- 3 · 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Mooney M20E
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N5594Q
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 6V6 · Nucla, COTo Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC)
- 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
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Fuel consumption calculations, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot contacted DUATS five separate times to plan his trip to Cedar City, Utah. The flight departed Boulder, Colorado, at 0908 and landed at Nucla, Colorado, at 1122 because of weather. The pilot departed Nucla, without refueling, at 1207. He received an in-flight IFR clearance at 1324, and proceeded on to Cedar City in IMC. At 1431, the pilot declared minimum fuel, and at 1443, the pilot declared an emergency for fuel exhaustion. The pilot reported that the engine started, and then at 1450, he said that he was circling to the ground. Although the pilot didn't say if the engine was running during the final minute of flight, physical evidence at the accident site suggested that it was not. An FAA inspector, who was driving southwest bound on I-15, approximately 7,000 feet south of the impact point, at the time of the accident, reported mist, light rain mixed with light snow, and visibility estimated to be 5 car lengths. An Air Force helicopter located the downed airplane at 1608. There were no indications of fuel in the aircraft at the accident scene.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate fuel consumption calculations. Factors were the loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion and the obscuring weather conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN99FA071
- Event ID
- 20001212X18738
- Case number
- DEN99FA071
- 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: 81fb5d98d8a5af71990239fd8d2b0720e8153682a06de3b85a7faa91e941ff91; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:07:56.824Z.