ERA10LA466 · Cessna 182Q
Cessna 182Q · Accident: fuel contamination before flight
From FDK · Fredrick, VA to Dare County Regional Airport (MQI)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's departure or destination. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA10LA466
- 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 182Q
- 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
- N812KT
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route Narrative disagrees
- From FDK · Fredrick, VATo Dare County Regional Airport (MQI), Manteo, 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
- Prior to flight
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On the morning of the accident, an annual inspection had been completed on the airplane. After picking up the airplane from his maintenance provider, the pilot preflighted the airplane and then departed. The takeoff and climb were uneventful; however, during the cruise portion of the flight, a total loss of engine power occurred. The pilot initiated an emergency descent and landed the airplane in a field that was used for sporting events. During the landing roll, the nose landing gear wheel dug into the ground, and the airplane nosed over. Examination of the fuel system revealed the presence of water in the fuel selector valve and the electric fuel boost pump discharge line. The pilot advised that the last time that he had added fuel to the airplane was 16 days before the accident flight. When he would park the airplane in the hangar at his home airport, he would not top off the fuel tanks, and the airplane would sit with approximately 30 gallons of fuel in the tanks. When asked if he had drained the sumps of the airplane during the preflight inspection prior to the accident flight, he advised that he did not because he was in a hurry.
Probable cause
A total loss of power due to water contamination in the fuel. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's inadequate preflight inspection.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA10LA466
- Event ID
- 20100906X43338
- Case number
- ERA10LA466
- 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: 932edf276986ba9942f53a7730d1da0a0eff03ab40ae17b331251e247f2b34c0; retrieved 2026-09-15T15:06:57.802Z.