CEN17LA179 · Beech 19
Hyde Flight School Beech 19 · Accident: fuel starvation while maneuvering
From Granbury Regional Airport (GDJ) to Weatherford, TX
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN17LA179
- 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
Beech 19
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 19
- 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
- N18925
- Operator
- Hyde Flight School
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Granbury Regional Airport (GDJ), Granbury, TXTo Weatherford, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 40 years (built 1977)
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Tree(s)
- 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 flight instructor stated that a preflight visual inspection of the airplane's fuel tanks indicated that the fuel in each tank was just above the tabs, which corresponded to 30 total gallons of fuel on board; he added that a pretakeoff engine run up revealed no anomalies. He and the student pilot then departed on the instructional flight and flew for about 30 minutes using fuel from the left fuel tank before switching to the right tank. The student reported that, when they switched fuel tanks, the left tank gauge indicated "just above half" full, and the right tank gauge indicated "slightly higher" than half full. Shortly thereafter, the student activated the carburetor heat and reduced engine power to idle to perform a simulated engine failure and forced landing; however, when the student applied the throttle at the conclusion of the simulation, engine power did not increase. The flight instructor performed a forced landing, during which the airplane impacted a tree.
Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the fuel selector was positioned to the left fuel tank, which was undamaged and contained no fuel. The right fuel tank contained about 14 gallons of fuel. The fuel lines from the engine firewall to the carburetor did not contain fuel. The fuel quantity transmitters were not tested, and their accuracy was not determined. No mechanical anomalies were noted that would have precluded normal operation of the airplane, and the loss of engine power is consistent with fuel starvation.
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s inadequate in-flight fuel management, which resulted in fuel starvation and a total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN17LA179
- Event ID
- 20170511X32627
- Case number
- CEN17LA179
- 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: 36337dbdab39221329a726ba7b66244002621e5c4487d3d3674f67e62d9d4447; retrieved 2026-09-16T05:16:13.485Z.