CEN14CA365 · Cessna 182A A
Quad City Skydiving Center Cessna 182A A · Accident: fuel exhaustion on approach
From Gen-Airpark (3G8) to Gen-Airpark (3G8)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN14CA365
- 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 182A A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N2209G
- Operator
- Quad City Skydiving Center
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gen-Airpark (3G8), Geneseo, ILTo Gen-Airpark (3G8), Geneseo, IL
- Aircraft age
- About 56 years (built 1958)
- 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
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was on final approach when the engine started to run out of fuel. She said her boss had a similar problem on a previous flight, and had to correct for it by pitching the nose up and down to force fuel into the fuel lines. The pilot recalled pitching the nose up and down but nothing after that. A witness, who saw the airplane pitching up and down several times before it impacted the ground, responded to the crash. He noted that the fuel selector was set to the "both" position and no fuel was leaking from either fuel tank's gas cap. When the airplane was righted, the witness said he saw several gallons of fuel drain from the left tank but not the right tank. When he visually checked the right fuel tank, it was empty. The left tank had about 9 gallons (about 6.5 gallons usable) still in the tank. A postaccident examination of the airplane by a Federal Aviation Administration inspector revealed the airplane sustained substantial damage to the firewall, forward engine mounts, right wing and vertical stabilizer and rudder. About 6 gallons of fuel was drained from the left wing tank and the right tank was empty. A review of the terrain where the airplane impacted the ground revealed the vegetation around the left tank was discolored from fuel, but the area around the right tank was not. No pre mishap mechanical discrepancies were noted with the engine or airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot's mismanagement of the available fuel supply, which resulted in a loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN14CA365
- Event ID
- 20140715X75012
- Case number
- CEN14CA365
- 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 UTC date the NTSB stores; the local time zone is not recorded, so the local date may differ by a day.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 44f0c8d951559b62a1e2822cd05d510cfc003f5361f1f91f205ed4f5238994fd; retrieved 2026-09-16T00:54:28.551Z.