CEN20LA133 · Cessna 150 E
Cessna 150 E · Accident: fuel exhaustion during initial climb
From Aero Country Airport (T31) to Aero Country Airport (T31)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN20LA133
- 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 150 E
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 150
- 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
- N4729U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Aero Country Airport (T31), McKinney, TXTo Aero Country Airport (T31), McKinney, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 55 years (built 1965)
- 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 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 › Task performance
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 conducted a preflight inspection of the airplane and estimated that he had about 14 gallons of fuel on board before departure based on measuring the fuel in the tanks with a dipstick. He then completed a 1-hour, round-trip flight during which he conducted three touch-and-go landings at the first destination, then returned to the departure airport and completed three more touch-and-go landings. During climbout after the third landing, the engine experienced a total loss of power. The pilot was unable to restart the engine and made a forced landing to a golf course; the airplane collided with a tee box and nosed over, resulting in substantial damage to the airplane’s wings, forward fuselage, vertical stabilizer, and rudder. While the airplane was inverted, fuel was leaking from the fuel tank caps, but the fuel caps remained intact and secured. After the airplane was flipped upright, 2 to 3 gallons of fuel were drained from the tanks. The airplane's unusable fuel is 3.5 gallons. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed no evidence of fuel in the rest of the fuel system and no other pre-accident anomalies that would have precluded normal operation. Based on that lack of usable fuel in the fuel system, it is likely that the pilot's inadequate preflight planning and inflight fuel management resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight fuel planning and inflight fuel management, which resulted in fuel exhaustion and a total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN20LA133
- Event ID
- 20200326X92314
- Case number
- CEN20LA133
- 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: d9ae01581de4a62f3de0dc76a5d6910716357b5f9540b204d41b02ca45d1b5cc; retrieved 2026-09-16T11:22:55.091Z.