ERA16CA203 · Beech F33A A
Beech F33A A · Accident: loss of engine power (total) on approach
From Laurence G Hanscom Field (BED) to Essex County Airport (CDW)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA16CA203
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Beech F33A A
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 33
- 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
- N444VT
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Laurence G Hanscom Field (BED), Bedford, MATo Essex County Airport (CDW), Caldwell, NJ
- Aircraft age
- About 31 years (built 1985)
- 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 · IFR missed approach
- 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 pilot of the single-engine airplane stated that he departed on a cross country flight but did not visually check the amount of fuel in the main tanks before departure and relied on his fuel gauges, which indicated 2/3-full (left tank) and 1/2-full (right tank). Both wingtip fuel tanks were empty. The pilot departed with the fuel selector on the left main tank. He then switched over to the right main tank while en route, but noticed the needle on the fuel gauge was not moving as the flight progressed. The flight was uneventful and the pilot made an instrument approach into his destination airport; however, he had to execute a missed approach due to low clouds. During the missed approach procedure he entered visual conditions and asked air traffic control (ATC) if he could maintain visual conditions and circle to land. The pilot said that as he was turning crosswind the engine began to run rough and stopped producing power. He tried to re-start the engine twice as he prepared for a forced landing to a closer runway. The pilot did not have time to switch the fuel selector to the left tank and ended up striking trees and landing short of the runway threshold. A postaccident examination revealed substantial damage to the firewall and fuselage. The landing gear was also damaged. Neither the left nor right wing fuel tanks were breached. About 20 oz of fuel was drained from the right main tank and about 21 gallons of fuel were drained from the left main tank. Though the pilot said the right fuel gauge was not reading properly, he acknowledged that he should have monitored fuel burn rate over a given period of time versus relying on just the fuel gauge.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to adequately manage the available fuel supply, resulting in fuel starvation and a total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA16CA203
- Event ID
- 20160605X31731
- Case number
- ERA16CA203
- 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: f839d0d541aeda448a055d214306ebbb6ee120743c705bd512afd81e01c1d5e1; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:27:34.957Z.