MIA08CA171 · Cessna 152
Ormond Beach Aviation Cessna 152 · Accident: fuel contamination during initial climb
From Ormond Beach Municipal Airport (OMN) to Ormond Beach Municipal Airport (OMN)
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA08CA171
- 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
- N65436
- Operator
- Ormond Beach Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ormond Beach Municipal Airport (OMN), Ormond Beach, FLTo Ormond Beach Municipal Airport (OMN), Ormond Beach, FL
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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 contamination
- 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 › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and student pilot of the Cessna 152 found water in the fuel tanks during the preflight inspection. Large amounts of fuel had to be sumped to ensure all the water was removed. Their 1-hour instructional flight was uneventful. They returned to the departing airport, landed and took a short break from flying. They then returned to the airplane to continue the instructional training of touch-and-go landings. The fuel system was not sumped before the second flight. During the initial climb after the first touch-and-go, the engine lost all power about 300 feet above the ground. The flight instructor took over control of the airplane and landed on a golf course fairway, striking trees before coming to a stop. Postcrash examination revealed 6 ounces of water in the gascolator and the right fuel tank cap had indication of leaking and infiltration.
Probable cause
Both pilots' inadequate preflight inspection of the fuel.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA08CA171
- Event ID
- 20081007X11055
- Case number
- MIA08CA171
- 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: investigation status. 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: e1235d4ebfe75bbf016aa31debf09570ee1566e60c25f7d586f6708828798c58; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:24:59.990Z.