CEN23LA153 · Ryan NAVION A
Ryan NAVION A · Accident: fuel contamination en route
From Scottsboro Municipal Word Field (4A6) to Conroe-North Houston Regional Airport (KCXO)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN23LA153
- 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
Ryan NAVION A
- Aircraft type
- Ryan NAVION
- 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
- N4229K
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Scottsboro Municipal Word Field (4A6), Scottsboro, ALTo Conroe-North Houston Regional Airport (KCXO), Conroe, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 75 years (built 1948)
- 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 contamination
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that, after a night cross-country flight, he overflew his private airport to see if the solar lights were working. Unable to see the lights, he began a climb and initiated a left turn towards an alternate airport. He stated that while in the turn, “the engine started to cut out,” and he initiated the emergency procedures checklist. Unable to restore the engine power, he initiated a forced landing. The airplane impacted several trees during the approach before impacting the ground, which resulted in substantial damage to the fuselage, empennage, and both wings. During a postaccident examination, sediment was found in fuel that was drained from the fuel tanks and the fuel manifold distributor. The amount of sediment in the distributor likely reduced the fuel flow to the engine, which resulted in a total loss of engine power.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power as a result of fuel contamination.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN23LA153
- Event ID
- 20230412107047
- Case number
- CEN23LA153
- 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 2023-04-12.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 5ee473d9dd5f473c8eda22c6bed247d7ef7c26366923117e31fe4e2b2866874c; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:30:19.407Z.