ERA16LA252 · Cessna 310 Q
Cessna 310 Q · Accident: fuel starvation on approach
From Bartow Executive Airport (BOW) to Bartow Executive Airport (BOW)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA16LA252
- 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
Cessna 310 Q
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 310
- 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
- N100CP
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bartow Executive Airport (BOW), Bartow, FLTo Bartow Executive Airport (BOW), Bartow, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 45 years (built 1971)
- 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 · VFR pattern downwind
- 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 › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot climbed the multiengine airplane to 13,500 ft mean sea level and performed a 2-hour aerial photography flight before descending and returning to the departure airport. As the pilot maneuvered the airplane in the traffic pattern for landing, the right engine lost power, and then the left engine lost power. The pilot concluded that the airplane would not reach the airport, so he chose swampy terrain for a forced landing, during which the wings, fuselage, and tail section sustained substantial damage.
Postaccident examination of the airplane and its engines revealed no preimpact mechanical anomalies that would have prevented normal operation. Both fuel selector handles were found in the "auxiliary" position. According to the airplane manufacturer's owner's manual, the first step in the Before Landing checklist was to move each fuel selector to the "main" position. Further, the auxiliary fuel system description stated, "Since the auxiliary fuel tanks are designed for cruising flight, they are not equipped with pumps and operation near the ground (below 1,000 ft [above ground level]), using auxiliary fuel tanks is not recommended." The pilot's failure to move the fuel selectors to the "main" position in accordance with the Before Landing checklist likely led to fuel starvation to both engines and their subsequent loss of power.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to move the fuel selectors to the “main” position in accordance with the Before Landing checklist, which resulted in fuel starvation and the total loss of power of both engines.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA16LA252
- Event ID
- 20160711X65900
- Case number
- ERA16LA252
- 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: d95a02572bd569899973fad4f0d0edd821b84e4e199fd6405386e86f72977a0b; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:39:06.550Z.