CEN20TA071 · Beech 60 B60
Beech 60 B60 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Abilene Regional Airport (ABI) to Odessa Schlemeyer Field (ODO)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN20TA071
- 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 60 B60
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 60
- 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
- N50JR
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Abilene Regional Airport (ABI), Abilene, TXTo Odessa Schlemeyer Field (ODO), Odessa, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 46 years (built 1974)
- 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
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was conducting a cross-country flight at a cruise altitude of 10,500 ft mean sea level when the left engine lost all power. He secured the engine and elected to continue to his destination. Shortly thereafter, the right engine lost all power. After selecting an airport for a forced landing, he overflew the runway and entered the pattern. The pilot stated that on short final, after extending the landing gear, "the plane quit flying and the airspeed went to nothing." The airplane landed 200 to 300 yards short of the runway threshold, resulting in substantial damage to the wings and fuselage. During a postaccident examination, only tablespoons of fuel were drained from the left tank. Due to the position of the airplane, the right tank could not be drained; however, when power was applied to the airplane, both fuel quantity gauges indicated empty fuel tanks. Neither fuel tank was breached during the accident, and there was no discoloration present on either of the wings or engine nacelles to indicate a fuel leak; therefore, the loss of engine power is consistent with fuel exhaustion.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power in both engines due to fuel exhaustion, which resulted in a landing short of the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN20TA071
- Event ID
- 20200129X95515
- Case number
- CEN20TA071
- 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, coordinates. 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: 364f488eda897e4dfd98c352640b1f00f8cc97e8933b0e9fbdc02475693770a3; retrieved 2026-09-16T11:01:30.332Z.