ERA10LA047 · Mooney M20C
Mooney M20C · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Smith Reynolds Airport (INT) to Asheville Regional Airport (AVL)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA10LA047
- 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
Mooney M20C
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N6896U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Smith Reynolds Airport (INT), Winston-Salem, NCTo Asheville Regional Airport (AVL), Asheville, NC
- 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 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was about 8,000 feet above mean sea level on an instrument flight rules flight when the pilot reported a total loss of engine power to air traffic control (ATC). Upon request of the pilot, ATC provided vectors to a nearby airport. When it became apparent that the airplane would not make it, the pilot elected to land in an empty field divided by a line of trees. As the airplane made its final approach, its right wing impacted a tree, causing the airplane to swing around and impact the ground nose first before coming to rest inverted. A Federal Aviation Administration inspector reported no visual indication or odor of fuel at the accident site. The wreckage recovery crew also reported that no fuel was observed during the recovery process. A wreckage examination revealed no discrepancy with the airplane’s fuel system. The pilot stated that the airplane was topped off 17 days prior to the accident and that he flew four flights for a total of 4 hours, including the accident flight.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion as a result of the pilot’s inadequate preflight fuel planning.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA10LA047
- Event ID
- 20091104X71833
- Case number
- ERA10LA047
- 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: 81d2e9f7a85602a94b06ea0ae8bd6b81a3edc73b8aa4452f8c95dc50606ed04b; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:28:09.394Z.