ERA15CA256 · Cessna 170
Cessna 170 · Accident: fuel contamination on approach
From John Bell Williams Airport (JVW) to John Bell Williams Airport (JVW)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA15CA256
- 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 170
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 170
- 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
- N4027V
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From John Bell Williams Airport (JVW), Raymond, MSTo John Bell Williams Airport (JVW), Raymond, MS
- Aircraft age
- About 67 years (built 1948)
- 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 contamination
- 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 › Aircraft power plant
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor was giving two student pilots their first flight lesson. After 20 minutes of taxi instruction, they departed the airport and flew for 20 minutes. While returning to the airport on final approach, the flight instructor advanced the power because the airplane was low on the approach path and discovered the engine had lost all power. The airplane was beyond gliding distance to the runway so the flight instructor made a 20 degree right turn and landed on a road located a quarter of a mile short of, and just to the right of, the extended runway center line. The flight instructor had to cross a high fence to make the road. The airplane cleared the fence but subsequently stalled about 10 to 15 feet above the road. The pilot made a hard landing on the road but, the road curved to the right and he was unable to keep the airplane on the centerline. The airplane then went off the left side, struck a log, and the left wing tip made contact with a fence post. It then ground looped and came to rest. Examination of the airplane revealed the left wing was substantially damaged, a large quantity of water was present in the right wing tank, and the fuel separator was full of water. Further examination revealed the right wing tank recessed type fuel cap seal had been leaking, and the airplane had been outside for several days in the rain. During preflight, the flight instructor drained all the sumps but did not notice the clear "fluid" that he drained from the right wing tank sump was all water. This was his first flight in the airplane and the preflight was conducted in light drizzle during a rain shower. The flight instructor advised that he did not remove or examine the fuel caps during the preflight as he did not want the water that had pooled in the cap recesses to get into the tanks. He did notice that the "fluid" from the right wing was not the proper color but attributed this to automobile gasoline that had been used in the airplane previously, as it had the odor of automobile gasoline.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's inadequate preflight inspection of the fuel system resulting in a total loss of engine power due to fuel contamination.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA15CA256
- Event ID
- 20150630X85451
- Case number
- ERA15CA256
- 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: 465d2abd1dfa9b0b2a086e323b5ae1c45f2ed08ba4129c64bde67c73785a29b7; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:28:38.499Z.