WPR13LA247 · Cessna 210-5A
Cessna 210-5A · Accident: fuel exhaustion on approach
From Chehalis Centralia Airport (CLS) to Pangborn Memorial Airport (EAT)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR13LA247
- 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 210-5A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- 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
- N4848U
- Operator
- Hanna David B
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chehalis Centralia Airport (CLS), Chehalis, WATo Pangborn Memorial Airport (EAT), Wenatchee, WA
- Aircraft age
- About 49 years (built 1964)
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern base
- 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 exhaustion
- 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 oper/perf/capability
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was on the base leg of the traffic pattern when the engine suddenly lost power. The airplane landed hard in a nose-high attitude, and the tail cone struck the runway, resulting in damage to the aft bulkhead and lower fuselage stringer. When a line service technician came with a tug to help get the airplane off the runway, the pilot told him that he had run out of fuel and that he had planned to continue past the airport but made an error in his fuel calculations. The pilot purchased additional fuel and continued to his destination with no further incident. Although the pilot stated that "vapor lock or a fuel system defect were potential causes" for the loss of engine power, his statements to the line service technician and the fact that the engine started and operated normally after fuel was added indicate that the reason for the loss of engine power was fuel exhaustion.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate fuel planning, which resulted in a loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion, and his improper landing flare, which resulted in the airplane’s tail striking the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR13LA247
- Event ID
- 20130529X40730
- Case number
- WPR13LA247
- 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, coordinates. 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: df6561dc1df197f611b5ccddc96d56652aa13e66d9933764f0b825b65eb27182; retrieved 2026-09-15T21:41:28.489Z.