CEN18LA373 · Cessna T310 R
DBT Transportation Services Cessna T310 R · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Laramie Regional Airport (KLAR) to Idaho County Airport (KGIC)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN18LA373
- 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 T310 R
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 310
- 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
- N376J
- Operator
- DBT Transportation Services
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Laramie Regional Airport (KLAR), Laramie, WYTo Idaho County Airport (KGIC), Grangeville, ID
- Aircraft age
- About 42 years (built 1976)
- 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 · 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 › Aircraft power plant
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed in the multiengine airplane and climbed to cruise altitude. He began to lean the fuel mixture for cruise power and felt a vibration and fluttering. He then slowed the airplane, began to troubleshoot the problem and turned back toward the airport; but when he advanced the throttles to takeoff power, there was no response from engines. The pilot stated that the airplane was “losing altitude fast,” and he attempted to glide the airplane to the interstate for an emergency landing. Unable to reach the interstate, the pilot subsequently performed a gear-up, forced landing to a field, during which the airplane sustained substantial damage. The pilot reported that he was distracted by the vibration and noise and he failed to enrichen the fuel mixtures after beginning the leaning procedure. He stated that there were no mechanical anomalies that would have precluded the engines from producing full power, and that the vibration was the result of the engines running rough due to lack of fuel.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to properly adjust the fuel/air mixtures, which resulted in a partial loss of engine power to both engines due to fuel starvation and a subsequent forced landing to a field.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN18LA373
- Event ID
- 20180906X21852
- Case number
- CEN18LA373
- 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: 1da56c5f09b2cb2967d6f8f7ebec14cf9c9756456a02db6ceaf5aaef50ded9f7; retrieved 2026-09-16T08:12:54.483Z.