CEN13CA134 · Mooney M20C
Mooney M20C · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Moriarty Municipal Airport (0E0) to Moriarty, NM
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN13CA134
- 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
- N6242U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Moriarty Municipal Airport (0E0), Moriarty, NMTo Moriarty, NM
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Before the accident flight, the pilot purchased 30 gallons of aviation gasoline, following which the fuel gauges indicated near half for each tank. During the accident flight, the pilot flew about 12 minutes south of the departure airport with the left fuel tank selected then turned north to return to the airport. About 5 minutes after turning north, the engine went to idle power. The pilot turned the carburetor heat on and activated the boost pump, and the engine returned to normal cruise power. The pilot indicated that, at this point, she should have switched the fuel selector valve to the right fuel tank but did not. The engine operated at cruise power for about 1 minute then quit completely. The pilot reported that because the airplane was about 1,500 feet above ground level and changing the fuel selector valve requires moving the pilot seat back about 18 inches “with no control of the aircraft,” she decided to perform a forced landing on a farm road directly ahead. During the landing, the right wing struck a fence post, and the airplane subsequently came to rest in a plowed field. Both wings sustained substantial damage. The pilot reported that the accident was caused by fuel starvation and that there were no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper fuel management, which resulted in a loss of engine power during cruise flight due to fuel starvation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN13CA134
- Event ID
- 20130114X71442
- Case number
- CEN13CA134
- 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: 7d2f92ee0cd2225984a8462e3a5879b1542ba4e798c3205da11afeb22ee5539b; retrieved 2026-09-15T20:45:12.137Z.