CEN16LA251 · Champion 7EC
Champion 7EC · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Tanner's Airport (9TE4) to Victoria Regional Airport (VCT)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16LA251
- 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
Champion 7EC
- Aircraft type
- Champion 7
- 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
- N9891B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tanner's Airport (9TE4), Port Lavaca, TXTo Victoria Regional Airport (VCT), Victoria, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 58 years (built 1958)
- 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 starvation
- 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 systems
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot was conducting the first flight in the airplane after an extended period of inactivity. The pilot reported that, about 10-15 minutes after takeoff, the engine sputtered. He applied carburetor heat and checked the position of the fuel selector and the magnetos. The engine operation smoothed out; however, a short time later, the engine experienced a total loss of power. The pilot conducted a forced landing in a corn field, which resulted in substantial damage to the airframe.
A postaccident examination of the airplane revealed the fuel line between the fuel strainer and the carburetor was deteriorated and leaking fuel, and the fuel selector was rigged in such a way that it would only open about 25%, which limited the amount of fuel flowing to the engine. The mechanic who signed off the airplane's most recent annual inspection, which was completed the month before the accident, reported that the airplane's owner assisted with the inspection, and that he did not verify the owner's work before endorsing the annual inspection.
Probable cause
The inadequate annual inspection of the fuel system that failed to detect a deteriorated fuel line and a misrigged fuel selector, which resulted in fuel starvation and a subsequent total loss of engine power. Contributing to the accident was the mechanic’s failure to verify the work completed by the owner before endorsing the annual inspection.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16LA251
- Event ID
- 20160706X84658
- Case number
- CEN16LA251
- 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: fb2a4539b81ce08be63f08ed9a3d90349c6d85df9db91fdf61a0a7824fb872f5; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:37:42.054Z.