CEN22LA300 · Cessna 150E
Cessna 150E · Accident: fuel exhaustion on approach
From PRIV · Harrah, OK to PRIV · Harrah, OK
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN22LA300
- 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
Cessna 150E
- 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
- N6147T
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From PRIV · Harrah, OKTo PRIV · Harrah, OK
- Aircraft age
- About 58 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
- Approach · VFR go-around
- 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
- 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 flight instructor reported that he and the student pilot departed the short turf runway with a low fuel load to practice landings at another airport. The flight instructor planned to refuel midway through the flight but forgot to stop for fuel, despite observing that fuel quantity gage indications were low during the flight. While the airplane climbed out during a go-around, the engine lost power due to fuel exhaustion. The flight instructor made a forced landing and the airplane impacted trees. The airplane sustained substantial damage to both wings. The flight instructor reported that there were no mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation.
The flight instructor attributed the inflight fuel planning error to a lack of recent flight instructor experience and the distractions of a challenging training environment.
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s inadequate inflight fuel planning that resulted in fuel exhaustion and a forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN22LA300
- Event ID
- 20220704105414
- Case number
- CEN22LA300
- 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: 0225cbfeb449361974aa13bf2053769a838a87a27b46dec4d96e47ce614ee402; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:25:01.126Z.