CEN13LA536 · Sweet Wayne A BUSHBY MUSTANG II
Sweet Wayne A BUSHBY MUSTANG II · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Council Bluffs Municipal Airport (CBF) to Campbell Airport (C81)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN13LA536
- 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
Sweet Wayne A BUSHBY MUSTANG II
- Aircraft type
- Sweet Wayne BUSHBY MUSTANG
- 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
- N54WS
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Council Bluffs Municipal Airport (CBF), Council Bluffs, IATo Campbell Airport (C81), Grayslake, IL
- 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 · 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
- Loss of engine power (total)
- 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
While at an altitude of 2,200 feet above ground level, the engine began to lose partial power. The pilot attempted to regain engine power by switching the fuel selector to the auxiliary or header tank; however, the engine subsequently lost total power. The pilot executed a forced landing to a field. During the forced landing, the airplane impacted vegetation and came to rest upright. Postaccident examination of the airplane showed that the right wing fuel tank was empty and left wing fuel tank contained some fuel. The auxiliary or header fuel tank was full of fuel. Examination of the engine and fuel system revealed no mechanical anomalies that would have precluded normal operation. The engine was functionally tested on the airframe. During the functional test, the engine started and operated without any anomalies noted. It is likely that the pilot was feeding fuel to the engine from a wing tank and did not switch to the auxiliary tank in time before the engine lost power.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper fuel management, which resulted in a loss of engine power due to fuel starvation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN13LA536
- Event ID
- 20130909X20434
- Case number
- CEN13LA536
- 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: 630752b1a2b65300b0eb04f3338fef6ef8e16c13946bd39c9546a58d4e75afa0; retrieved 2026-09-15T22:47:55.975Z.