CEN13FA432 · Piper PA-30
Piper PA-30 · Accident: fuel contamination during initial climb
From Tradewind Airport (TDW) to Lubbock, TX
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN13FA432
- 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
- 1 · 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
Piper PA-30
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-30
- 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
- N8306Y
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tradewind Airport (TDW), Amarillo, TXTo Lubbock, TX
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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 contamination
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot of the twin-engine airplane contacted air traffic control (ATC) and requested visual flight rules flight following and was cleared for departure. Three minutes later, he checked in with the controller, and about 6 minutes later, he radioed to ATC that he was going to return to the departure airport because he was having engine trouble. Shortly thereafter, the pilot reported that his left engine had stopped. The controller asked if he wanted to declare an emergency; the pilot declined and reported that he had the airport in sight. Security camera video showed the aircraft returning to the airport at a very slow speed, then the aircraft turned sharply to the left and rapidly descended below the trees. About 0.8 miles from the approach end of the runway, the airplane impacted nose down into the yard of a home within a dense populated residential area. A witness reported that he saw the airplane turning and that the airplane's left propeller was not turning and not feathered. Examination of the wreckage revealed that the left propeller assembly showed little deformation, consistent with little or no rotation or power at impact. The right propeller had deformation signatures consistent with rotation/power at impact. No mechanical anomalies were found during detailed examination of the left engine and its components.
Thunderstorms and significant amounts of rain had passed through the area during the week before the accident. The airplane had been parked outside on the ramp during the heavy rain. All fuel flow components through the left and right fuel sumps and filters were located and examined. Examination of the left sump and filter revealed it to be contaminated with about 75-percent water as well as a dark sand-like substance. The right side sump contained mostly fuel with only a trace amount of water. The airplane was fueled 3 days before the accident and the source of the fuel was tested; no water contamination was found. It is likely that water entered the fuel system while the airplane was parked outside in the rain and that the pilot did not sump the fuel tanks before takeoff and the left engine stopped producing power due to water contamination. It is unknown why the pilot could not maintain control of the airplane with the right engine producing power.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to maintain airplane control after a loss of left engine power due to water-contaminated fuel. Contributing to the accident was the lack of a proper preflight that could have detected water accumulation in the fuel system before takeoff.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN13FA432
- Event ID
- 20130725X10529
- Case number
- CEN13FA432
- 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: b368ef8cf5abccab66e4dc56f1f0e193db902a59f85116d1fac631d2041b8740; retrieved 2026-09-14T16:01:12.562Z.