CEN23LA166 · Protech PT2
Protech PT2 · Accident: fuel starvation en route
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN23LA166
- 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
Protech PT2
- Aircraft type
- Protech PT2
- 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
- N44048
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 25 years (built 1998)
- 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 · cruise
- 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 › Aircraft systems
- 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, who was the airpane owner and builder, reported that while flying at about 1,000 ft above the ground, the airplane’s engine lost power and that attempts to restart it were not successful. He stated that there was a clearing farther along his flight path, but he did not have enough altitude to reach the clearing and elected to land on a gravel road. During the landing approach he saw a powerline and maneuvered to avoid it but struck a pine tree. The airplane came to rest in a nose-down attitude among the trees and sustained substantial damage to both wings and the fuselage.
Examination of the airplane revealed no anomalies with regard to the engine; however, it was found that the in-line fuel filters installed in the fuel lines from the airplane’s wing mounted fuel tanks were obstructed. The pilot stated that he did not know when the fuel filters were last checked or changed and that they may have been on the airplane for about 20 years.
The recorded temperature and dew point at the time of the accident were in the range for serious carburetor icing at glide power.
Based on the available evidence the reason for the loss of engine power was likely due to the lack of periodic maintenance or replacement of the fuel filters, which allowed them to become obstructed and led to fuel starvation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s lack of proper maintenance, which allowed the fuel filters to become obstructed, leading to fuel starvation and a subsequent engine power loss.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN23LA166
- Event ID
- 20230426107150
- Case number
- CEN23LA166
- 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, coordinates, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2023-04-25.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d3e7158c8830fe1206eb6eb84557f603dc1fcfbcebaccd8c772c8e4d41eefac2; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:32:57.198Z.