ERA17LA205 · Cessna P206 A
Cessna P206 A · Accident: fuel related on approach
From Danbury Municipal Airport (DXR) to Eagles Nest Airport (31E)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA17LA205
- 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 P206 A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 206
- 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
- N206TF
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Danbury Municipal Airport (DXR), Danbury, CTTo Eagles Nest Airport (31E), West Creek, NJ
- Aircraft age
- About 51 years (built 1966)
- 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 related
- 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 commercial pilot was on the second leg of a postmaintenance flight. The first flight leg, which was about 1-hour long, was uneventful, and the pilot reported that the fuel selector was positioned to the right tank during this flight leg. He landed the airplane but did not purchase fuel before departing for the return leg. The pilot reported that, during the return leg, the fuel selector was positioned to the left tank. While on final approach to the airport, the pilot added power to go around. He turned onto the crosswind and then downwind legs of the airport traffic pattern, and while on the downwind leg, the engine lost all power. The pilot switched the fuel selector to the right tank, but engine power was not restored. Realizing that the airplane would be unable to reach the runway, the pilot conducted a forced landing in trees, and the airplane came to rest inverted.
During postaccident examination, more than the unusable amount of fuel was drained from the left fuel tank, which was breached in two locations; only about 6 ounces of fuel were drained from the unbreached right fuel tank. No fuel was found in the engine-driven fuel pump or the flow divider, which is indicative of fuel starvation. Examination of the fuel supply system revealed no evidence of preimpact mechanical failures or malfunctions that would have precluded normal operation. The engine was started and operated briefly using the fuel that had been drained from the airplane with no discrepancies noted.
Although the pilot stated that he conducted the entire second flight leg with the fuel selector positioned to the left tank and then switched to the right tank after the engine lost power, the fuel selector was found positioned to the left tank, which had more than the unusable amount of fuel. Therefore, it is likely that the pilot was approaching the airport with the fuel selector positioned to the right tank, which ran out of fuel, and that he then switched to the left tank too late to restore engine power. Given this and the lack of fuel in the engine-driven fuel pump and flow divider, it is likely that the pilot mismanaged the fuel, which resulted in the loss of all engine power.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper fuel management, which resulted in fuel starvation and the subsequent total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA17LA205
- Event ID
- 20170613X90729
- Case number
- ERA17LA205
- 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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2017-06-13.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 85a8994538d513a8845863bd6c74926900ae193f489aa2186b47ad3455f25287; retrieved 2026-09-16T05:24:29.702Z.