CHI04LA120 · Cessna 188B
Cessna 188B · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Liberty, MO to Lawrence Smith Memorial Airport (LRY)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI04LA120
- 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 188B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 188
- 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
- N188SA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Liberty, MOTo Lawrence Smith Memorial Airport (LRY), Harrisonville, MO
- 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
- 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
- Fuel system › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › Fuel consumption calculations, improper
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was on a positioning flight when it sustained substantial damage on impact with trees during a forced landing after a loss of engine power in cruise flight. The pilot reported that he had finished spraying the last field at 1715 and the left fuel gage showed 1/2 tank (14 gallons) of fuel remaining and the right tank was dry. The pilot reported the airplane consumed about 14 gallons of fuel per hour, and that he thought he had about 45-60 minutes of fuel remaining when he departed the field. The pilot reported that the engine quit while in cruise flight, and he excuted a forced landing and impacted trees at approximately 1745. The fuel system was inspected during the recovery of the airplane. The right fuel tank was dry. The left wing tank had a ruptured fuel line. The inspection revealed there was no fuel found from the fuel line to the engine driven fuel pump. No fuel was found from the engine driven fuel pump to the mixing valve/fuel control. No fuel was found in the line from the fuel control to the fuel distributor/spider.
Probable cause
Fuel exhaustion due to the pilot's improper fuel calculations. Contributing factors to the accident included the inaccurate fuel gage and the trees.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI04LA120
- Event ID
- 20040520X00625
- Case number
- CHI04LA120
- 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: ded6d11b68116fe5ce9c6796590fb05cede1a172ddac118dcab543aee3e59387; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:14:26.784Z.