DFW05CA234 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From La Porte Municipal Airport (T41) to T41
Event
- NTSB case
- DFW05CA234
- 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 152
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 152
- 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
- N68440
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From La Porte Municipal Airport (T41), La Porte, TXTo T41
- 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 · descent
- 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
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, improper
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 preflight inspection, the 305-hour private pilot visually inspected both fuel tanks and estimated that he would have enough fuel for two hours of flight with an additional twenty-minute fuel reserve. The pilot then departed and climbed to 5,500 feet to perform as an air traffic relay station in support of helicopters operating in the Gulf of Mexico. Upon completion of his mission, while the airplane was descending back to the originating airport, the engine lost power. The pilot elected to land in a marshy field and during the landing roll the airplane nosed over, coming to rest in an inverted position. No fuel was present when the airplane's wings were removed for recovery. The tachometer reading recorded by the pilot before takeoff was 770.9 hours and was noted as 773.2 hours at the accident site. The total elapsed time was two hours and twenty minutes.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper in-flight planning and decisions, which resulted in fuel exhaustion. A contributing factor was the lack of suitable terrain for the forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DFW05CA234
- Event ID
- 20051004X01575
- Case number
- DFW05CA234
- 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: a4609bf82fd1fff45b257d82a0c5c0dd59ce471491b0b6e284d5ab7eda592694; retrieved 2026-09-22T05:23:23.294Z.