CEN09CA021 · Cessna 150M
Jet Air Cessna 150M · Accident: fuel exhaustion on approach
From The Eastern Iowa Airport (CID) to Iowa City Municipal Airport (IOW)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN09CA021
- 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 150M
- 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
- N533JR
- Operator
- Jet Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From The Eastern Iowa Airport (CID), Cedar Rapids, IATo Iowa City Municipal Airport (IOW), Iowa City, IA
- 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
- 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 › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot planned a local night flight to an airport approximately 16 miles north-northwest of the departure airport. He noted that the fuel gauges indicated nearly full on the left fuel tank and about 1/3 on the right fuel tank. The pilot indicated that he had not visually checked the fuel level prior to flight, but had relied on the fuel gauge indications. He reported that after departure, the flight proceeded to the intermediate airport as planned. He executed a practice Instrument Landing System (ILS) approach and landed without incident. The pilot stated that before the return flight, the fuel gauges indicated "a little less than full" on the left fuel tank and about 1/4 on the right fuel tank. After takeoff, the flight proceeded direct to the intended destination at 2,500 feet mean sea level (msl). With no reported traffic in the area, the pilot selected a straight-in approach. However, about 3/4 of a mile from the runway the engine began to lose power. His efforts to restore full power were not successful. The mixture control had not been adjusted after takeoff and was at full rich for the entire flight. He attempted to stretch the glide to reach the runway, but the left wing struck a tree during the approach. The airplane subsequently impacted an adjacent roadway. A post accident inspection by a Federal Aviation Administration inspector revealed that the fuel tanks did not appear to be breached, and that only a small amount of fuel remained in the fuel tanks. A review of the airplane flight log and fueling records revealed that it had been flown 3.4 hours since it was last refueled. Manufacturer's documentation noted that the airplane’s fuel capacity was 26 gallons total, with 22.5 gallons usable. Fuel consumption ranged from 4.9 gallons per hour (gph) at 65-percent power to 5.9 gph at 78-percent power (full throttle) at 2,000 feet pressure altitude. Approximately an additional 0.8 gallons are consumed during start-up, taxi, and takeoff.
Probable cause
Fuel exhaustion due to the pilot's failure to visually verify that sufficient fuel was on-board prior to flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN09CA021
- Event ID
- 20081016X22926
- Case number
- CEN09CA021
- 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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2008-10-07.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 6d5a4323f2cf71528d123b9f0e73f6956b3e5ec51204f7ed120f661ed42d2e04; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:28:25.647Z.