WPR22LA247 · Beech H35
Beech H35 · Accident: fuel starvation on approach
From Arlington Municipal Airport (AWO) to Port of Whitman Business Air Center Airport (S94)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR22LA247
- 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
Beech H35
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 35
- 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
- N5546D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Arlington Municipal Airport (AWO), Arlington, WATo Port of Whitman Business Air Center Airport (S94), Colfax, WA
- Aircraft age
- About 65 years (built 1957)
- 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
- 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 › 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 of the airplane reported that, he departed with a total of 50 gallons of fuel for a cross-country flight. After about 1.5 hours, as the airplane approached the destination airport, the fuel-injected engine experienced a total loss of power. The pilot switched the fuel selector valve from the right main fuel tank to the left main fuel tank and attempted to restart the engine, to no avail. The airplane impacted upsloping terrain during the forced landing, which resulted in the engine separating from the firewall. Postaccident examination of the airplane and engine revealed no mechanical anomalies that would have resulted in the loss of engine power. According to the manufacturer, the unusable fuel in each main fuel tank is 3 gallons. The fuel recovered from the right and left main tanks were about 2 and 4 gallons, respectively. A total of about 16.5 gallons was recovered from the main and auxiliary fuel tanks combined. It is likely that the pilot did not properly monitor the fuel supply during the cross-country flight, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel starvation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to monitor and manage the fuel supply, which resulted in a loss of engine power due to fuel starvation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR22LA247
- Event ID
- 20220712105457
- Case number
- WPR22LA247
- 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: 71d81e926f371ae9620c796c3a57b00babdb078cc49baeb0c097ba7b29ef6906; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:26:51.307Z.