SEA07CA008 · Beech E-55
Beech E-55 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Friday Harbor Airport (FHR) to S67 · Nampa, ID
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA07CA008
- 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
Beech E-55
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft E-55
- 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
- N94LL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Friday Harbor Airport (FHR), Friday Harbor, WATo S67 · Nampa, ID
- 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
- 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
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › Distance/speed, misjudged
- 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, he departed thinking the airplane had 115 gallons of fuel aboard, when it had 55 gallons of fuel aboard. The shortfall of 60 gallons was the result of a refueling request that the pilot made to a fixed base operator that did not take place and that the pilot did not verify had taken place. Fuel exhaustion occurred in both engines when the airplane was approximately 7,500 feet above an airport. The pilot spiraled down over the airport and entered the pattern for runway 14. He intentionally elected "to err on the side of landing long and not have any risk of being short." On short final, the airplane was "clearly high and fast, pretty much as expected, but not slowing, which was not expected." The airplane touched down approximately 1,000 feet prior to the end of the runway, overran the runway end, impacted a concrete irrigation channel about 350 feet from the runway end, and came to a stop approximately 200 feet past the channel.
Probable cause
The dual loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion as a result of the pilot's failure to adequately determine the amount of fuel aboard the airplane during his preflight preparation. A contributing factor was the pilot's misjudgment of distance/speed during the forced landing, which resulted in a runway overrun.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA07CA008
- Event ID
- 20061114X01669
- Case number
- SEA07CA008
- 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: c2f915192965c91f839b41fe3a0664a52671ff56f793862d177805668e3af541; retrieved 2026-09-21T18:40:00.087Z.