CEN22LA343 · Beech E33A
Beech E33A · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS) to SJG · Siloam Springs, AR
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's departure or destination. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN22LA343
- 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 E33A
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 33
- 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
- N7555N
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route Possible conflict
- From City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS), Colorado Springs, COTo SJG · Siloam Springs, AR
- Aircraft age
- About 54 years (built 1968)
- 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 › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After about 2.5 hours of cross-country night flight, the engine lost all power near an airport where the pilot planned to refuel. The pilot stated that he thought that he ran out of fuel and executed a forced landing to a vegetated field about 1 mile from the airport. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the left wing and front of the fuselage. Examination of the airplane did not reveal any mechanical anomalies with the engine that would have precluded normal operation. The left-wing tank was found dry and the right fuel tank was found with about 1 inch of unusable fuel at the accident site. The fuel selector switch was found in the left fuel tank position. The pilot did not know how much fuel was onboard the airplane at the time of departure and had delayed refueling the airplane due to the price of fuel.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate preflight inspection and fuel planning, and improper in-flight decision making which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN22LA343
- Event ID
- 20220726105583
- Case number
- CEN22LA343
- 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: local date, investigation status, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2022-07-21.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 10077dcbeda021c87d8904912da96b334b02c4ef0b2939c4d5ebe7951275ce7b; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:31:08.495Z.