DEN00LA137 · Mooney M20C
Mooney M20C · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (BJC) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN00LA137
- 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
Mooney M20C
- 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
- N6253U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (BJC), Broomfield, COTo 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 · climb to 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 starvation
- 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
- Pilot in command › Fuel tank selector position, improper
- Terrain condition › Ditch
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After 45 minutes of flight, while conducting touch-and-go landings on a local area personal flight, a total loss of power occurred during climb following a touch-and-go landing. The student pilot attempted to turn back and land the aircraft in the opposite direction on the runway he had departed. He was unable to make it to the runway and landed in a field where the aircraft struck a ditch during landing roll causing substantial damage. The pilot stated the engine quit due to fuel starvation, and investigation verified that the fuel tank selected contained no usable fuel. The aircraft fuel capacity was 75.6 usable gallons and the flight departed with an estimated 25 gallons on board. Review of the pilot's operating handbook for the airplane provided information that the pilot's handbook gave specific preflight and procedural guidance to pilots to verify fuel on board prior to departure and to ensure that critical regimes of flight (landing and takeoff) were conducted on the fullest tank. The student pilot had 65 hours total flight time and 61 hours in the accident aircraft make and model.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper fuel tank selector position resulting in fuel starvation and the ditch impacted during the landing roll. A contributing factor was the pilot's failure to follow published procedures and directives.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN00LA137
- Event ID
- 20001212X21442
- Case number
- DEN00LA137
- 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: 08cacc84ebd845888313f84e69b681e13884a3a35db1120e141b17035eb1dd90; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:40:02.013Z.