DFW06CA045 · Cessna 150L
Prairie Air Service Cessna 150L · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) on approach
From Bartlesville Municipal Airport (BVO) to Tulsa International Airport (TUL)
Event
- NTSB case
- DFW06CA045
- 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 150L
- 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
- N18132
- Operator
- Prairie Air Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bartlesville Municipal Airport (BVO), Bartlesville, OKTo Tulsa International Airport (TUL), Tulsa, OK
- 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 · VFR pattern final
- 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; 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
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › Fuel consumption calculations, inaccurate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The 519-hour private pilot departed on a 307-nautical mile round-robin cross country flight in a single-engine airplane. During the return flight, the pilot elected to land at an intermediate airport to purchase additional fuel; however, it was a national holiday and no one answered his repeated calls to the "after-hours" phone number. The pilot then asked another pilot where the closest airport was located so he could purchase fuel, and was informed of an airport about 20 miles away. The pilot proceeded to fly towards that airport but was unable to make radio contact with someone at the fixed base operator (FBO) to help him purchase additional fuel. The pilot then elected to fly to much larger airport about 34.4 nautical miles beyond his position, where he knew he could purchase fuel. The pilot stated that he encountered a significant headwind, but calculated that he had sufficient fuel on-board to complete the flight. When the airplane was established on final approach, the engine stopped producing power and the airplane impacted trees and terrain about a mile short of the runway. Examination of the airplane's fuel system revealed there was 1.5 gallons of fuel onboard at the time of the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper preflight planning and preparation, which resulted in a loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DFW06CA045
- Event ID
- 20060119X00091
- Case number
- DFW06CA045
- 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 2006-01-01.
- API snapshot SHA-256: fdfdb6f63b658184f6f46d8d1969e1b187d8992d0b2ff919eaae17283a48f68b; retrieved 2026-09-21T18:50:31.128Z.