SEA08LA139 · Cessna 182D
Cessna 182D · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Lynden Airport (38W) to Chehalis Centralia Airport (CLS)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA08LA139
- 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 182D
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N8855X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lynden Airport (38W), Lynden, WATo Chehalis Centralia Airport (CLS), Chehalis, WA
- 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
- Defining eventThe 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
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Task performance
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 reported that he landed at an airport along his route of flight to refuel. The airport was out of fuel and the pilot decided to continue his flight without refueling. While en route, the engine lost power and the pilot initiated a forced landing to a field. During the landing roll, the airplane collided with the foundation of an old structure. Post-accident inspection of the airplane found that the left wing fuel cap was missing. Blue colored streaking was observed on the top of the left wing, flap and side of the fuselage. Approximately a half gallon of fuel was present in the right fuel tank. The left fuel tank was empty. The fuel cap was later found near the fueling station at the airport where the pilot had attempted to refuel the airplane.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion caused by a missing fuel tank cap that allowed the fuel to be siphoned out. Also causal was the pilot's inadequate preflight inspection at the last airport.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA08LA139
- Event ID
- 20080625X00915
- Case number
- SEA08LA139
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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 2008-05-25.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d73141f6b9f8c5418c6ca75a34f5cb4f25ca983e8b0d2c822dc3db85e65b2277; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:48:46.537Z.