ERA14LA242 · Mooney Aircraft CORP. M20K
Mooney Aircraft CORP. M20K · Accident: loss of engine power (total) on approach
From Woodbine Municipal Airport (OBI) to Delaware Coastal Airport (GED)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA14LA242
- 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
- 0
- 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
Mooney Aircraft CORP. M20K
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N200DP
- Operator
- Grund Joseph R
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Woodbine Municipal Airport (OBI), Woodbine, NJTo Delaware Coastal Airport (GED), Georgetown, DE
- Aircraft age
- About 35 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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
The pilot departed on the 40-mile flight with an unknown quantity of fuel onboard the airplane, but he estimated that it had about 10 gallons more than he thought was needed for the flight. While maneuvering to land, he increased the engine power twice, but the engine did not respond. He anticipated that the airplane could land on the airport property; however, the airplane struck wires and terrain short of the runway. Seven gallons of fuel were recovered from the 78.6-gallon fuel system, of which 3 gallons were unusable. The amount of fuel recovered from each tank could not be determined, and which tank the pilot had selected at the time of the loss of engine power could also not be determined. However, after the accident, the pilot reported that data from the airplane's engine monitor revealed that the fuel flow stopped 60 seconds before the propeller stopped. He added that he probably should have purchased fuel before his departure and that, if he had it to do over, he would. After replacing the damaged propeller with a slave propeller and adding 5 gallons of fuel in each wing tank, an engine test run was conducted; the engine started immediately, accelerated smoothly, and ran continuously without interruption throughout the test.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper preflight planning and in-flight fuel management, which resulted in fuel starvation and a total loss of engine power. Also causal to the accident was the pilot’s failure to see and avoid the wires on the airport boundary.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA14LA242
- Event ID
- 20140519X00544
- Case number
- ERA14LA242
- 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: 9ed93450a2f39ce8911c0e8587e1410130d27d414b07ff39a6b2688ba1ea3641; retrieved 2026-09-15T23:38:04.474Z.