CEN15LA107 · Cessna 210J J
Cessna 210J J · Accident: loss of engine power (total) while maneuvering
From Wellington Municipal Airport (EGT) to Dodge City Regional Airport (DDC)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN15LA107
- 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 210J J
- 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
- N3320S
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Wellington Municipal Airport (EGT), Wellington, KSTo Dodge City Regional Airport (DDC), Dodge City, KS
- Aircraft age
- About 46 years (built 1969)
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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 private pilot reported that he departed on a 1-hour cross-country flight with the fuel tank gauges showing about 1/4 tank each. The left fuel tank was selected at takeoff. After 20 minutes of flight, the pilot switched to the right fuel tank and noticed that the right fuel tank gauge dropped unusually fast to near empty. The pilot then selected the left fuel tank and entered a left downwind to his destination airport. Upon turning onto the base leg, the engine lost power. The pilot's attempts to restart the engine were not successful. The pilot conducted a forced landing, and the airplane impacted the ground about 1 mile from the destination airport.
Examination of the airplane wreckage showed the fuel selector valve was positioned to the left wing tank. The three-bladed propeller blades were bent upward from impact but did not show curling or twisting, indicating that the engine was not producing power at impact. The airframe gascolator had just enough fuel to fill the bowl, and no fuel came out of the fuel feeder line. Neither wing tank contained any fuel. A certificated aircraft mechanic from a nearby airport who had arrived within 15 minutes of the accident reported that he did not smell aviation gasoline in the air or on the ground.
The pilot reported that more accurate fuel management and awareness would have prevented the accident. He stated that the flight hours in his pilot log indicated that he had enough fuel for the flight after his most recent top-off refueling but that he likely had flown the airplane 20 to 30 minutes more than his pilot logs indicated. He stated that fuel tanks should be visually inspected before flight.
Probable cause
The loss of engine power on approach due to fuel exhaustion, which resulted from the pilot's improper preflight fuel planning and inspection.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN15LA107
- Event ID
- 20150120X02640
- Case number
- CEN15LA107
- 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: 9ef289eccbc18dfa92a645b855037b8efd4a5a5045da9245f563b7e58b617c49; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:01:55.515Z.