CEN19LA311 · Cessna 172 E
Cessna 172 E · Accident: fuel contamination during initial climb
From Grassy Butte, ND to Grassy Butte, ND
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN19LA311
- 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
- 0
- 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 172 E
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N5347T
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Grassy Butte, NDTo Grassy Butte, ND
- Aircraft age
- About 55 years (built 1964)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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 contamination
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot reported that he recently fueled the airplane with fuel from an external supply tank on his ranch. On the day of the accident, the pilot taxied the airplane to a north-south road and started the takeoff roll to the north. The airplane lifted off and climbed to about 40 ft above ground level when the engine experienced a total loss of power. The pilot made a left turn to land in a parallel field; the airplane landed hard and came to rest upright, sustaining substantial damage to the left wing and fuselage. Postaccident examination revealed a significant amount of water in the carburetor and in the airplane's fuel tanks. Water was also found in the supply tank from which the pilot fueled the airplane. The pilot reported that he did not check the airplane's fuel tanks for contamination before departing on the flight, nor had he checked the fuel supply tank for contamination. The circumstances of the accident are consistent with a total loss of engine power due to water contamination of the fuel system.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power due to water contamination of the fuel, and the pilot's failure to conduct a preflight inspection.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN19LA311
- Event ID
- 20190910X65550
- Case number
- CEN19LA311
- 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: aac3454e16d7b9a37717eca4d9278ce619e89fb756b806e7a5234d436fb4eeed; retrieved 2026-09-16T10:01:41.603Z.