Central Flying Service Mitsubishi MU 300 incident
Mitsubishi MU 300 · Incident: powerplant system/component malfunction/failure during takeoff
From Bill & Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field (LIT) to Lake Charles Regional Airport (LCH)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16IA091
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
Mitsubishi MU 300
- Aircraft type
- Mitsubishi MU-300
- Category
- Airplane · from aircraft type
- 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
- N200LP
- Operator
- Central Flying Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bill & Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field (LIT), Little Rock, ARTo Lake Charles Regional Airport (LCH), Lake Charles, LA
- Aircraft age
- About 33 years (built 1983)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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
- Powerplant system/component malfunction/failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot and the copilot were conducting an on-demand, air taxi flight with two passengers on board. The pilot reported that, during the takeoff roll, he heard a "grumble" and that the airplane began shaking. The passengers reported to the flight crew that they saw flames coming out of the right engine. The flight crew then stopped the airplane on the runway and shut down the engines.
Postincident examination of the right engine revealed that it had ingested a fuel mat that airplane fuelers had placed on the inboard trailing edge of the wing during preflight fueling and failed to remove after fueling. The pilots reported that they did not conduct an exterior preflight inspection of the airplane after it was fueled and that, during a subsequent visual inspection of the fuel caps, they did not see the fuel mat because of its location on the right wing. The pilots' inadequate inspection of the airplane after it was fueled led to the right engine ingesting the fuel mat during the takeoff roll.
Probable cause
The flight crew's inadequate preflight inspection of the airplane, during which they failed to see a fueling mat that had been placed on the inboard trailing edge of the right wing, which the right engine subsequently ingested during the takeoff roll. Contributing to the incident was the airplane fueler's failure to remove the fuel mat after fueling the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16IA091
- Event ID
- 20160120X82009
- Case number
- CEN16IA091
- 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: 5b2c50aef56deb8e831f4645c3b875e295d6bb5e7e964f7dffcdad80ce225427; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:06:30.370Z.