CEN13LA565 · Cessna 210-5(205)
Cessna 210-5(205) · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Cheyenne Regional Jerry Olson Field (CYS) to Thomas P Stafford Airport (OJA)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN13LA565
- 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 210-5(205)
- 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
- N8472Z
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cheyenne Regional Jerry Olson Field (CYS), Cheyenne, WYTo Thomas P Stafford Airport (OJA), Weatherford, OK
- Aircraft age
- About 50 years (built 1963)
- 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 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 › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane experienced a total loss of engine power during a descent to the planned destination airport. The pilot reported that, before departure, he had fuel added to the preexisting fuel onboard the airplane, which he "confirmed" during the preflight inspection by looking at the fuel gauges. He did not visually inspect the fuel tanks. He entered the amount of added fuel into a fuel totalizer, and the totalizer indicated that the total amount of fuel on board was greater than the amount of fuel needed for the flight. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed about 3 to 4 gallons of fuel in the left fuel tank and less than 1 gallon of fuel in the right fuel tank. Because the pilot did not visually verify the amount of fuel onboard the airplane, the fuel totalizer likely showed an inaccurate amount of fuel and led to the pilot's belief that he had sufficient fuel for the flight.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate preflight inspection and fuel planning, which resulted in fuel exhaustion and a total loss of engine power during descent.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN13LA565
- Event ID
- 20130930X05717
- Case number
- CEN13LA565
- 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: 10870dcd86e0b8da58124735cfed0a156465487bc3a848caa92cfdc00e9be980; retrieved 2026-09-15T22:55:38.908Z.