LAX03LA014 · Cessna 210C
Cessna 210C · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) on approach
From Gallup Municipal Airport (GUP) to Ontario International Airport (ONT)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX03LA014
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna 210C
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- 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
- N9788X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gallup Municipal Airport (GUP), Gallup, NMTo Ontario International Airport (ONT), Ontario, CA
- 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
- Approach
- 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
- Pilot in command › Fuel tank selector position, incorrect
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the instrument approach the engine quit, and the pilot attempted a forced landing in hilly terrain and poor visibility. According to flight planning information recovered from inside the airplane, it had departed with full fuel (63.5 useable gallons). The airplane had been airborne for about 3:17 hours at the time of the accident. Prior to disassembly of the airplane for recovery, the recovery agent drained the fuel tanks. The left tank had about 13 gallons of blue liquid with the odor of aviation gasoline, and the right tank was empty. The manufacturer ran the engine in a test cell. It performed normally without any hesitation or interruptions in power from idle to full throttle.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to position the fuel selector to the tank containing fuel resulting in a loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX03LA014
- Event ID
- 20021025X05385
- Case number
- LAX03LA014
- 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, coordinates. 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: ed8d2089c5bc1648cb3c39cc9dfd1ac123e80923e4edb494506e7d6c3af8e7a8; retrieved 2026-09-21T09:33:41.808Z.