CEN23LA080 · Beech G33
Beech G33 · Accident: fuel starvation on approach
From Middleton Municipal Morey Field (C29) to Brookeridge Air Park (LL22)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN23LA080
- 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 G33
- 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
- N9283Q
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Middleton Municipal Morey Field (C29), Middleton, WITo Brookeridge Air Park (LL22), Downers Grove, IL
- Aircraft age
- About 52 years (built 1971)
- 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 as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported the engine lost total power while he was on approach to his destination airport. According to the pilot, he attempted to restart the engine by switching fuel tanks, but he may have forgotten to engage the boost pump, and the restart was unsuccessful. The pilot then conducted a forced landing on a freeway, during which the right and left wings sustained substantial damage. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the left fuel tank contained no usable fuel, the right fuel tank had visible but unknown quantity of fuel. After the airplane was recovered from the freeway, a functional engine test run, with the right fuel tank selected, was completed with no anomalies noted. After the accident, the pilot stated that he should have incorporated better fuel management techniques. The loss of engine power was attributed to fuel starvation.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate fuel management, 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 CEN23LA080
- Event ID
- 20230117106582
- Case number
- CEN23LA080
- 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, 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: 4b4afebe73730591bf235daf156c088380b2be3a29b96dd311293c3109815f12; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:14:50.982Z.