Noble Air Charter Cessna 402 B accident
Cessna 402 B · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Tampa International Airport (TPA) to Sarasota Bradenton International Airport (SRQ)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA18LA011
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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 402 B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 402
- 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
- N900CR
- Operator
- Noble Air Charter
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tampa International Airport (TPA), Tampa, FLTo Sarasota Bradenton International Airport (SRQ), Sarasota, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 39 years (built 1978)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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 · climb to cruise
- 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 pilot departed on the non-scheduled passenger flight with one passenger onboard; the flight was the 3rd leg of a 4-leg trip. About 13 minutes after departure, he advised air traffic control that the airplane was “fuel critical” and requested vectors to the nearest airport, which was about 7 miles away. Both engines subsequently lost total power and the pilot performed a forced landing on a street about 2 miles from the airport, during which the airplane collided with two vehicles. Examination of the airplane revealed substantial damage to the fuel tanks, with evidence of a small fire near the left wingtip fuel tank.
Fuel consumption calculations revealed that the airplane would have used about 100 gallons of fuel since its most recent refueling, which was the capacity of the main (wingtip) tanks. Both fuel selectors were found in their respective main tank positions. Given the available information, it is likely that the pilot exhausted all the fuel in the main fuel tanks and starved the engines of fuel. Although the total amount of fuel on board at the start of the flight could not be determined, had all tanks been full, the airplane would have had about 63 gallons remaining in the two auxiliary tanks at the time of the accident. The auxiliary fuel tanks were breached during the accident and quantity of fuel they contained was not determined. Examination of the engines revealed no evidence of any preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot's mismanagement of the onboard fuel, which resulted in fuel starvation, a total loss of power to both engines, and a subsequent forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA18LA011
- Event ID
- 20171018X84140
- Case number
- ERA18LA011
- 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, cause areas. 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: 5e61e58e8bb3497a96a879791dc5310ac37287bfad3c541e0736de468f55e713; retrieved 2026-09-16T05:56:43.572Z.