CEN20CA249 · Mooney M20C
Mooney M20C · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From OKC Will Rogers World Airport (OKC) to Enid Woodring Regional Airport (WDG)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN20CA249
- 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
Mooney M20C
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N6728U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From OKC Will Rogers World Airport (OKC), Oklahoma City, OKTo Enid Woodring Regional Airport (WDG), Enid, OK
- Aircraft age
- About 57 years (built 1963)
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After about 1 hour of normal flight, the engine lost power. The pilot switched from the right fuel tank to the left fuel tank and the engine restarted. About 5 minutes later, the engine lost power again. The pilot decided to land the airplane in a field since the nearest airport was about 8 miles away. Upon touchdown in the field, the airplane hit a berm, and the landing gear collapsed. The aft fuselage and empennage sustained substantial damage. After the accident, the pilot reported that he was not familiar with the recently purchased airplane’s fuel system. He also stated that he normally topped off his fuel tanks before each flight, but he did not do so before the accident flight. Examination of the airplane at the accident site confirmed that there was no usable fuel on board.
Probable cause
The loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion and the pilot’s improper fuel planning before the flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN20CA249
- Event ID
- 20200625X74804
- Case number
- CEN20CA249
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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: c60b474b125c93c02e6649ba0535851cbd3c5c449813cd7f646d14ed02bcf8be; retrieved 2026-09-16T11:56:42.000Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: destination. WDG is Enid Woodring Regional Airport, whose city is Enid, OK; Lahoma is the nearby town where the forced landing occurred.