CEN13LA283 · Air Tractor Inc AT-302
Airborn AG Services Air Tractor Inc AT-302 · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Slidell Airport (ASD) to Anahuac, TX
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN13LA283
- 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
Air Tractor Inc AT-302
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor AT-302
- 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
- N3650B
- Operator
- Airborn AG Services
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Slidell Airport (ASD), Slidell, LATo Anahuac, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 34 years (built 1979)
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot stated that, on previous flights, he noticed that the cockpit fuel quantity gauge indicated greater fuel consumption from the left fuel tank than the right fuel tank. However, during the accident flight, the fuel quantity gauge indicated greater fuel consumption from the right fuel tank than the left fuel tank. The airplane was not equipped with a fuel tank selector switch. Due to his concern about the fuel quantity imbalance, the pilot decided to land at an alternate airport. However, the engine experienced a total loss of power while the pilot was banking the airplane for landing, so he chose to land the airplane on a rough field. The airplane's left wing struck the ground, and the left main landing gear broke off. Postaccident examination of the airplane found no usable fuel in the right wing fuel tank and about 22.9 gallons of fuel in the left wing fuel tank. No contamination was found within the fuel supply. The airplane manufacturer issued Service Letters Nos. 178 and 178A in 1999 and reissued them in 2002, 2004, and 2009, to advise operators that a fuel imbalance could occur and lead to fuel starvation. A warning placard was never incorporated on AT-302 airplanes, only on later models, and no warning about this issue was added to the AT-302 flight manual.
Probable cause
The improper decision by the pilot to attempt a flight with a known fuel system-related maintenance discrepancy, which resulted in a fuel imbalance and subsequent fuel starvation during an approach to an alternate airport with a rough field. Contributing to the accident were the manufacturer's failure to incorporate a warning on AT-302 airplanes and to add a warning about this issue in the AT-302 flight manual.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN13LA283
- Event ID
- 20130517X43218
- Case number
- CEN13LA283
- 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 2013-05-09.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 1484e8274dfe2f48964ad56a798b62dcdbcbc749fe15a825138b14315fd5df99; retrieved 2026-09-15T21:35:36.786Z.