CEN15LA296 · Colonial C 1
Colonial C 1 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Bridgeport Municipal Airport (XBP) to Bowie Municipal Airport (0F2)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN15LA296
- 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
Colonial C 1
- Aircraft type
- Colonial C-1
- 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
- N257B
- Operator
- Harold D Love · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bridgeport Municipal Airport (XBP), Bridgeport, TXTo Bowie Municipal Airport (0F2), Bowie, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 59 years (built 1956)
- 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
- 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 pilot reported that he had flown the airplane about 8 to 10 times after its most recent fueling and that he intended to fly to the destination airport to refuel the airplane. Before departure, the fuel quantity gauge indicated that the fuel tank was about 3/8 full of fuel. About 5 minutes after departure, the engine experienced a loss of power, so the pilot conducted a forced landing in a field, during which the airplane landed hard.
A postaccident examination revealed that the fuel bladder tank was collapsed, and a small amount of unmeasured fuel was observed. The fuel system remained intact, and there was no evidence of a fuel spill at the accident site. The engine operated normally when the fuel trapped in the tank was freed by rocking the wings. It is likely that the small amount of fuel in the fuel tank was unusable during the flight and was insufficient to reach the engine. The pilot stated that the fuel bladder had become unsnapped from the wing, which allowed the fuel quantity transmitter to indicate a false reading. However, the pilot did not conduct adequate preflight fuel planning to ensure there was sufficient fuel on board because he relied solely on the fuel gauges.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion. Contributing to the accident was the unsnapped fuel bladder, which resulted in an inaccurate fuel quantity indication, and the pilot's inadequate preflight fuel planning, during which he relied solely on the fuel gauges to determine the amount of fuel on board.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN15LA296
- Event ID
- 20150707X13004
- Case number
- CEN15LA296
- 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: 4aeab9655cee033169b60a44e268d5938444abe07ed4947545452e036dc6080f; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:29:57.776Z.