ANC12LA046 · Cessna A185F
Cessna A185F · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Skwentna, AK to Lake Hood Seaplane Base (PALH)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC12LA046
- 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 A185F
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 185
- 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
- N1795R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Skwentna, AKTo Lake Hood Seaplane Base (PALH), Anchorage, AK
- 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 · cruise
- 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
The private pilot and one passenger departed from a lake on a personal cross country flight. During the pilot’s preflight check, he noted that the right wing fuel tank contained about 32 gallons of fuel, and the left wing fuel tank contained about 5 gallons of fuel. About 8 miles south of the departure lake, at an altitude of about 2,000 feet mean sea level, the airplane’s engine lost power. The pilot said that he turned on the fuel boost pump, and the engine rpm rose momentarily but dropped again. He stated that he did not recall checking the fuel selector valve as part of his emergency restart procedures. He executed a forced landing in a marsh.
The pilot stated that he always operated the airplane with the fuel selector valve in the “Both Tanks On” position; however, a postaccident inspection of the airplane revealed that the airplane’s fuel selector valve was in the “Left Tank Only” position. A postaccident engine run revealed no mechanical anomalies with the engine, and it operated normally at all power settings. An annual inspection of the airplane was completed on May 20, 2012, and the airplane had flown approximately four hours since the inspection.
Both the normal “Before Takeoff” and the “Emergency Landing without Engine Power” checklists direct the pilot to check the fuel selector valve position. Given the lack of mechanical deficiencies with the airplane's engine and the discovery of the fuel selector valve in the “Left Tank Only” position, it is likely that the pilot did not check the fuel selector valve either during his preflight or after the loss of engine power. Considering the amount of fuel noted in the left wing fuel tank during the pilot’s preflight, it is also likely that the engine lost power due to fuel starvation.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper fuel management, which resulted in fuel starvation and a total loss of engine power in cruise flight. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's failure to follow the checklist after the loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC12LA046
- Event ID
- 20120606X73319
- Case number
- ANC12LA046
- 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 2012-06-02.
- API snapshot SHA-256: efb13bb6cd4f1544e0da6e564af2461e1519c07b902ee7abc454f0aeaa5ebe33; retrieved 2026-09-15T18:25:31.891Z.