SEA02FA007 · Cessna TR182
Cessna TR182 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From 3V5 · Fort Collins, CO to Boise Air Terminal/Gowen Field (BOI)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA02FA007
- 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
- 2 · 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 TR182
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N756CE
- Operator
- Holzer, George L. · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 3V5 · Fort Collins, COTo Boise Air Terminal/Gowen Field (BOI), Boise, ID
- 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 · descent
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › Refueling, not performed
- Pilot in command › Stall, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed Boise, Idaho, in the Lycoming O-540-L3C5D powered Cessna TR182 arriving at Ft. Collins 3.0 hours of tach time later on the day before the accident. The aircraft departed Boise with full (88 gallons useable) fuel tanks and remained overnight at Ft. Collins where there was no overnight security available. The aircraft was fueled with 30 gallons of fuel at Ft. Collins the next day with 20 gallons in the right tank (to full according to the fueler) and 10 gallons in the left tank (to 3/4 full according to the fueler). A credit card receipt for this fueling was date/time stamped for 1712. A radar track showed the aircraft flying westbound crossing 7 nm south of Pocatello and 21 nm north of Gooding, Idaho, where public airports with lighted runways and fuel were located. At 2112, in dark night conditions, the pilot radioed Salt Lake Air Route Traffic Control that he had an engine out and about one minute later referenced a 'field on fire' as a potential landing site. The aircraft impacted terrain in the bottom of a shallow (+12 degree sloped) bowl in mountainous/hilly terrain throughout which a controlled burn was underway. The left wing outboard leading edge impacted first, followed by the engine and there was no post-crash aircraft related fire. The landing gear were down and the flaps were retracted. The tach at the accident site read a total of 6.6 hours from the Boise departure reading. Less than a pint of fuel was extracted from the aircraft's fuel system and there was no evidence of fuel leakage/staining on the aircraft. The pilot operating handbook performance data section showed the highest cruise fuel burn rate for the aircraft's engine was about 15.2 gallons/hour. Documentation found within the aircraft tracking tach times, fuel, location(s) and date from 1996 forward referenced fuel burn rates ranging as high as 19.0 gallons/hour.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to refuel en route resulting in fuel exhaustion, and his inadvertent entry into a stall condition during the emergency descent. Contributing factors were dark night conditions and mountainous/hilly terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA02FA007
- Event ID
- 20011023X02134
- Case number
- SEA02FA007
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2001-10-17.
- API snapshot SHA-256: ceaadd1d9f01ff61ae1e26bc1ecbea386e01885704b6c34eb43ce1f17e0c2465; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:19:48.141Z.