ERA12LA571 · Beagle B206 SERIES 2
Beagle B206 SERIES 2 · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Placid Lakes Airport (09FA) to Tallahassee International Airport (TLH)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12LA571
- 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
Beagle B206 SERIES 2
- Aircraft type
- Beagle B206
- 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
- N26GW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Placid Lakes Airport (09FA), Lake Placid, FLTo Tallahassee International Airport (TLH), Tallahassee, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 43 years (built 1969)
- 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 › Aircraft systems
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, before the flight, he performed a preflight inspection on the twin-engine airplane, during which he checked the fuel quantity onboard the airplane by looking at the fuel computer, which displayed 65 gallons. He then added 20 gallons of fuel to the left wing fuel tank and 25 gallons to the right wing fuel tank. He then entered the added amount of fuel into the fuel computer for a total of 110 gallons, which was consistent with the fuel gauges, which display fuel in pounds and which indicated that 275 pounds of fuel was in the left tank and 350 pounds of fuel was in the right tank. This amount should have been sufficient for the flight.
After departure, the pilot turned toward his destination and climbed the airplane to about 3,000 feet above sea level. Later, the right engine began to surge, and "after going through the checklist" the pilot elected to do a precautionary landing. The pilot asked air traffic control for the closest airfield; however, the pilot, after seeing nothing but trees, decided to land on a road with the landing gear in the up position. During the landing, the left wingtip struck a tree.
Examination of the wreckage revealed that both propellers were in the feathered position, the wing flaps were up, the landing gear was up, and the wing structure and both firewalls were substantially damaged. Further examination revealed that the left wing fuel tank contained about 22 gallons of fuel, and the right wing fuel tank was almost devoid of fuel. Thus, it is likely that the pilot did not monitor the fuel balance and allowed an imbalance between the two fuel tanks to occur, which resulted in the right engine being starved of fuel. This could have been remedied at any time during the cruise portion of the flight if the pilot had opened the cross-feed valve for the right engine, which would have allowed the right engine to feed fuel from the left tank and would have allowed him to balance the fuel load.
Examination of the cockpit switches revealed that the airplane had not been properly configured by the pilot for one-engine-inoperative flight per the guidance contained in the operating manual. If this had been done, the the airplane could have continued to fly at altitude, allowing the pilot to reach a diversionary airport and execute a one-engine-inoperative landing.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper in-flight fuel management, which resulted in fuel starvation and the right engine’s complete loss of power. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s improper configuration of the airplane following the loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12LA571
- Event ID
- 20120921X60325
- Case number
- ERA12LA571
- 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: 1dcdac3fe3bc6ecd607b1f5e8553e516679fc8a9147e543956e73e681dca9546; retrieved 2026-09-15T19:59:18.181Z.