GAA18CA149 · Beech B 60
Mike & Mayo Partners LP Beech B 60 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Addison Airport (ADS) to Mexia Limestone County Airport (LXY)
Event
- NTSB case
- GAA18CA149
- 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 B 60
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft B
- 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
- N77MM
- Operator
- Mike & Mayo Partners LP
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Addison Airport (ADS), Dallas, TXTo Mexia Limestone County Airport (LXY), Mexia, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 36 years (built 1982)
- 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
- En route
- 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 exhaustion
- 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 pilot in the multi-engine, retractable landing gear airplane reported that, during an instrument flight rules cross-country flight, about 5,000 ft above mean sea level, the left engine surged several times and he performed an emergency engine shutdown. Shortly afterward, the right engine lost power.
During the emergency descent, the airplane struck treetops, and landed hard in a field with the landing gear retracted.
The airplane sustained substantial damage to both wings, the engine mounts, and the lower fuselage.
The pilot reported that he had requested 200 gallons of fuel from his home airport fixed base operator, but they did not fuel the airplane. The pilot did not check the fuel quantity during his preflight inspection.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration Airplane Flying Handbook, Chapter 2, page 2-7, pilots must always positively confirm the fuel quantity by visually inspecting the fuel level in each tank.
The pilot reported that there were no mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper preflight inspection of the fuel level, which resulted in a loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s failure to lower the landing gear before the emergency landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record GAA18CA149
- Event ID
- 20180307X84146
- Case number
- GAA18CA149
- 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 UTC date the NTSB stores; the local time zone is not recorded, so the local date may differ by a day.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 8cf5460e67be99b9eb718ca474485f00e1170d5eb2177fe416d3c63c4652e19c; retrieved 2026-09-16T06:35:44.343Z.