CEN21LA250 · Vans RV9 A
Vans RV9 A · Accident: fuel starvation during initial climb
From Greater Portsmouth Regional Airport (KPMH) to Fleming Mason Airport (KFGX)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN21LA250
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
Vans RV9 A
- Aircraft type
- Vans RV9
- 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
- N20YY
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Greater Portsmouth Regional Airport (KPMH), Portsmouth, OHTo Fleming Mason Airport (KFGX), Flemingsburg, KY
- Aircraft age
- About 15 years (built 2006)
- 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 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 › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Experience/knowledge
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 reported he’d taken off and was about 10 minutes from the airport when the airplane’s engine lost power and began to descend. The pilot misdiagnosed the power loss as an electronic ignition problem and troubleshot it as such. However, after turning on the electric fuel pump and switching fuel tanks several times, the pilot was unable to restore engine power and elected to perform a forced landing to a field. During the forced landing the airplane nosed over and came to rest inverted. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the rudder. Federal Aviation Administration inspectors reported that during a postaccident examination of the airplane the right fuel tank was empty, and the left fuel tank had about 4 gallons of fuel. The fuel selector had the right fuel tank selected. No other mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airplane were found that would have precluded normal operations. The pilot reported he spoke with the previous owner and was unaware that when switching fuel tanks, it could take about 10 seconds for the new tank to pick up fuel. The pilot reported that he had never run a fuel tank empty and was not familiar with how the engine would respond, and how long it would take for fuel to return to the engine when another fuel tank was selected.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper use of the airplane’s fuel system, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel starvation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN21LA250
- Event ID
- 20210606103214
- Case number
- CEN21LA250
- 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, 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: dca0c406874e2c477634686a9975c056bbe034c027a202c64ca2f374830bff4c; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:07:54.214Z.