CHI00LA055 · Beech BE-35
Beech BE-35 · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Montgomery-Wehrman Airport (4MO) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI00LA055
- 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
- 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
Beech BE-35
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft BE-35
- 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
- N2012D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Montgomery-Wehrman Airport (4MO), Montgomery City, MOTo 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 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
- 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
- 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
- Fuel system › Starvation
- Pilot in command › Fuel consumption calculations, inaccurate
- Pilot in command › Procedures/directives, not followed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that after the engine quit he scanned the gauges. The left fuel tank indicated 1/4 tank of fuel. The pilot reported that the left fuel tank was selected, but he did not change the fuel selector to the right fuel tank when he tried to perform an engine re-start. The pilot executed a forced landing in a field, but the landing gear collapsed after it 'bounced over a little drainage ditch' during landing rollout. The pilot inspected the left wing tank for fuel. He reported he, 'couldn't see gas in the tank,' and that the left tank was 'pretty empty.' He checked the right tank and estimated there was 3 to 4 gallons of fuel in the right tank. The right fuel gauge indicated 1/4 tank. The pilot reported he had fueled the airplane with approximately one hour of fuel in each tank, and he had flown for approximately one hour when the engine quit. The airplane's flight manual lists '(1) Select other fuel tank (check to feel detent)' as a step in the emergency procedures for loss of engine power.
Probable cause
fuel starvation due to the pilot's failure to make accurate fuel consumption calculations and the pilot's improper emergency procedures for engine re-start. A factor was the ditch.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI00LA055
- Event ID
- 20001212X20215
- Case number
- CHI00LA055
- 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: d53269ed7f8e6b34f4c62c9646112bd4d2363358243eec049b8aca6f2cc6cbc6; retrieved 2026-09-22T13:31:05.343Z.