DEN06CA060 · Air Tractor AT-602
Air Tractor AT-602 · Accident: loss of engine power while maneuvering
From Ulysses, KS to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN06CA060
- 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
Air Tractor AT-602
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor AT-602
- 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
- N50669
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ulysses, KSTo not recorded
- 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- Maneuvering · aerial application
- 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 › Starvation
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed a private airstrip approximately 1 hour prior to the accident with approximately 140 gallons of fuel. He sprayed one field with a power setting of 80 gallons per hour fuel burn, then sprayed a second field with a power setting of 75 gallons per hour fuel burn. After spraying the second field, the pilot noted the fuel gauges indicated 1/4 fuel in the left tank, and 1/8 fuel in the right tank. He turned on the fuel boost pump and sprayed passes on the west end of the field using a back to back pattern, running north and south with right and left turns. The last pass was to the north. He pulled up over power lines and turned right (downwind) for the local airstrip located 3 miles away. The engine lost power, and the pilot attempted a restart. The engine started "for a second" and then lost power again. The pilot then landed straight ahead, downwind, in a hilly corn field. The airplane impacted a ditch at the end of the field collapsing the main landing gear. Examination of the airframe revealed the fuselage and firewall were buckled. An airframe manufacturer's service letter provided guidance to the Owner/Operator in preventing and/or minimizing the imbalance of the fuel level between the left and right main fuel tanks, which could lead to fuel starvation if one tank goes dry. The fuel imbalance can result from migration of fuel from one tank to the other, or uneven fuel flow to the header tank.
Probable cause
the loss of engine power due to fuel starvation. A contributing factor was the impact with a ditch during the forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN06CA060
- Event ID
- 20060510X00537
- Case number
- DEN06CA060
- 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: 52857dd2546c3167b21b08f54b5932c03a4eae181724428a586df3c07d1911a9; retrieved 2026-09-21T18:48:04.510Z.