FTW03TA087 · Beech T-34B
Beech T-34B · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Suwannee County Airport (24J) to Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport (BTR)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW03TA087
- 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
- Government
- 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
Beech T-34B
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft T-34
- 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
- N20684
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Suwannee County Airport (24J), Live Oak, FLTo Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport (BTR), Baton Rouge, LA
- 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
- Public Aircraft
- 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)
- 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
- Fuel system › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Approximately 3 hours into the cross-country flight, the airplane experienced a total loss of engine power. The pilot attempted to restart the engine; however, the attempts were unsuccessful. Due to the night conditions, the pilot executed a forced landing to "the lightest colored area of vegatation." During the forced landing, the airplane impacted trees and the terrain, and came to rest upright. An FAA inspector, who responded to the accident site, reported that "there was no fuel in the fuel tanks," and no evidence of fuel was found at the accident site.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate inflight planning/decision resulting in fuel exhaustion and the loss of engine power. A contributing factor was the night light conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW03TA087
- Event ID
- 20030123X00090
- Case number
- FTW03TA087
- 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 2003-01-19.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d51e55eb6af4b0dac11708cc0ae5063bce10c9c91be09278d8d5bc164a60771b; retrieved 2026-09-18T21:17:58.562Z.