LAX02LA044 · Cessna 150K
Oahu Aviation Flight School Cessna 150K · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Lanai Airport (LNY) to Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX02LA044
- 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 150K
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 150
- 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
- N6136G
- Operator
- Oahu Aviation Flight School
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lanai Airport (LNY), Lanai, Hawaii, HITo Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL), Honolulu, HI
- 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
- 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
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
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 rented the airplane and did not fill the fuel tanks prior to taking off for a planned round-robin flight between the islands of Oahu and Lanai. The pilot spent about 30 minutes on the ground at Lanai during which time he did not check the quantity of fuel in the tanks. No fuel was obtained at Lanai, and the pilot attempted to fly back to Oahu. After flying a total of approximately 1.9 hours, fuel starvation occurred about 8 miles east of the pilot's intended destination, the Honolulu International Airport. The pilot made a forced landing in a park and during rollout the airplane collided with a mango tree. During the postimpact airplane examination, the undamaged right wing fuel tank was found containing several drops of fuel. The damaged (but not breached) left wing fuel tank contained about 1 quart of fuel. According to the Cessna Aircraft Company, the airplane's nominal fuel consumption rate is 6.0 gallons per hour, and its unusable fuel in all flight conditions is about 3.5 gallons.
Probable cause
Fuel exhaustion due to the pilot's inadequate preflight inspection and improper in-flight decision and planning.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX02LA044
- Event ID
- 20011213X02397
- Case number
- LAX02LA044
- 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 2001-12-10.
- API snapshot SHA-256: a048e8847b40ab6aa4a702461c765a3eb386a06d03dfd64c00991b9cdd94aa66; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:48:15.076Z.