CEN16LA018 · Diamond DA20-C1
Diamond DA20-C1 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Harrison County Airport (KASL) to Harrison County Airport (KASL)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16LA018
- 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
Diamond DA20-C1
- Aircraft type
- Diamond DA20
- 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
- N165DC
- Operator
- Lari L. Gee · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Harrison County Airport (KASL), Marshall, TXTo Harrison County Airport (KASL), Marshall, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 11 years (built 2004)
- 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 · cruise
- 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 › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Miscellaneous
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot was conducting a cross-country flight in the airplane without the owner's permission. While en route, the pilot reported to air traffic controllers that the engine had lost power and that he did not think he would be able to glide to the destination airport. He also said that it was dark and that he could not see anything below him. The pilot made a forced landing in a field 6.9 miles east of his destination, which resulted in substantial damage to the airplane. No fuel was found in the fuel tanks.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to operate the airplane without the owner’s permission and his lack of preflight planning, which resulted a total loss of engine power due fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16LA018
- Event ID
- 20151021X22953
- Case number
- CEN16LA018
- 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: 937a2d753026cd69b24ff15bb3457ab1f568644b57c2f48d70d57774ad1d1e9c; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:54:39.218Z.