CEN17LA162 · Cessna 210
Cessna 210 · Accident: fuel starvation on approach
From Page Municipal Airport (PGA) to Salida Airport - Harriet Alexander Field (ANK)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN17LA162
- 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 210
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- 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
- N9589T
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Page Municipal Airport (PGA), Page, AZTo Salida Airport - Harriet Alexander Field (ANK), Salida, CO
- Aircraft age
- About 57 years (built 1960)
- 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 base
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot was landing the airplane at the conclusion of a cross-country flight when the engine experienced a total loss of power in the airport traffic pattern. The pilot attempted to restart the engine without success and subsequently landed the airplane in a field, where it impacted a fence and irrigation equipment. The pilot stated the right fuel tank was selected at the time of the accident. Postaccident examination revealed that the right tank contained 14 to 15 gallons of fuel, and that the left fuel tank contained about 1 gallon of fuel. The fuel selector was in the right tank position. The engine functioned normally during a postaccident test run. Given the lack of engine anomalies, it is likely that the airplane was operating on the left tank at the time of the accident, and the loss of engine power was the result of fuel starvation; it is likely that the pilot moved the fuel selector to the right tank position during his attempt to restart the engine.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate fuel management, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel starvation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN17LA162
- Event ID
- 20170420X82100
- Case number
- CEN17LA162
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2017-04-20.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 7289db1450da5b1892d87322a13ea4e9a46cdd387e6155608e00d8d964e5f202; retrieved 2026-09-16T05:11:12.859Z.