DEN01LA055 · Cessna 172F
Cessna 172F · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS) to 1V5 · Boulder, CO
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN01LA055
- 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
- Unknown
- 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 172F
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N8389U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS), Colo. Springs, COTo 1V5 · Boulder, CO
- 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
- 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; Stall
- 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(cfi) › Stall, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Shortly after departure, the flight instructor and his student became cold. The heater control was not in the usual position on the instrument panel (both pilots were accustomed to flying later model Cessna 172s). The student located a "white knob" but could not read the nomenclature plate. Believing it was the heater control, he pulled the knob. Approximately 1.5 hours later, the engine lost power. The instructor assumed control of the airplane and turned towards a private airstrip about 2 miles away. He instructed the student to make emergency radio calls and try restarting the engine. Strong headwinds prevented the airplane from gliding to the runway. The airplane stalled and impacted terrain. The airplane had been aloft for 1.7 hours when the engine lost power. Postaccident inspection disclosed the student had inadvertently pulled the fuel strainer control knob instead of the cabin heat control knob. There were no fuel stains on the bottom of the airplane. The fuel strainer control is spring-loaded to the CLOSED position. Examination disclosed the spring was missing. According to the Cessna 172F SERVICING INTERVALS CHECK LIST, the fuel strainer should be disassembled and cleaned every 100 hours. The last 100 hour inspection performed on N8389U was on December 14, 2000, 85.67 hours before the accident.
Probable cause
the flight instructor inadvertently stalling the airplane during a forced landing. Contributing factors were fuel exhaustion due to inadvertent opening of the fuel drain, lack of familiarity with the airplane, inadequate supervision of the flight, and the missing strainer spring.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN01LA055
- Event ID
- 20010305X00540
- Case number
- DEN01LA055
- 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: 8b771fef8c05f5eb6bb178ae04065b077e7dd9445af809c2e419c3579f720cfd; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:08:30.766Z.