ERA09LA512 · Beech H35
Beech H35 · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Dee Jay Airport (8PA1) to Dee Jay Airport (8PA1)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA09LA512
- 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 H35
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 35
- 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
- N5469D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dee Jay Airport (8PA1), Ono, PATo Dee Jay Airport (8PA1), Ono, PA
- 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
- 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 starvation
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, he took off with 10 gallons of fuel on board. The pilot operating handbook stated that 10 gallons of fuel in each tank was required. Enroute, the engine lost power, and the pilot performed a forced landing in a residential area about 1,500 feet from an airport runway. An on-scene examination of the wreckage revealed that the fuel selector was on the right tank, and that there was no fuel in either tank, although any remaining fuel from the left tank could have leaked out when the wing separated from the fuselage. The fuel feed system on the airplane provided, depending on power settings, 6 to 25 gallons per hour of fuel return to the left tank, and the airplane flew 20 to 25 minutes. Although the loss of engine power occurred at a relatively low altitude, there was no evidence that the pilot attempted to utilize the fuel remaining in the left tank either before or after the event.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to fuel starvation as a result of the pilot's mismanagement of available fuel.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA09LA512
- Event ID
- 20090910X51930
- Case number
- ERA09LA512
- 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: 5adffd7a87118f4220b962c14002cd58e5cc4c2db178fc87928366911e7b05d1; retrieved 2026-09-15T12:57:13.296Z.