ATL04LA009 · Cessna 150G
Cessna 150G · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Brunswick Golden Isles Airport (BQK) to Jekyll Island Airport (09J)
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL04LA009
- 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 150G
- 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
- N4662X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Brunswick Golden Isles Airport (BQK), Glynco Jetport, GATo Jekyll Island Airport (09J), Jeykll Island, GA
- 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
- Loss of engine power
- 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
- Tree(s)
- 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 › Fuel management, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Preflight planning/preparation, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, about 10 minutes after takeoff he noticed a "power drop" and a noise on the pilot side which sounded like exhaust, as if he had blown a cylinder or lost compression. He said that at first he could not go above 1200 feet mean sea level (MSL). When the pilot was not able to maintain altitude, the pilot elected to make a forced landing into a swamp. On the approach for the landing the pilot pulled the nose of the airplane up and airplane collided with trees. Examination of the airplane found leading edge damage to both wings and twisting of the fuselage. Examination of the engine, found no evidence of fuel in the fuel tanks, fuel lines, fuel gascolator or in the carburetor. On May 3, 2005 at 1500 eastern daylight time, the pilot was asked about the amount of fuel he had onboard his airplane at the time of the accident. On his Pilot/Operator Report he stated that he departed with 21-gallons of fuel on board. However, at the time of the accident there was no fuel found in the fuel tanks. The pilot stated that he did not recall if he had checked the fuel tanks prior to takeoff. He also said that at the accident site there was no fuel spill according to the local authorities on-scene. He stated that if there was no fuel on the airplane then he could not argue with the findings.
Probable cause
The pilot's preflight planning and the mismanagement of the fuel supply that resulted in fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL04LA009
- Event ID
- 20031009X01698
- Case number
- ATL04LA009
- 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: b904d400b1850deb732e72d1620b73ed556ac7ec0167c000d8e6798a35b9b103; retrieved 2026-09-22T08:23:29.321Z.