ERA23LA262 · Burton Searey
Burton Searey · Accident: fuel starvation during takeoff
From an unrecorded airport to Statesville Regional Airport (KSVH)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA23LA262
- 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
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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
Burton Searey
- Aircraft type
- Burton SEAREY
- 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
- N2440S
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Statesville Regional Airport (KSVH), Statesville, NC
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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 › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Experience/knowledge
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot of the amphibious, amateur-built airplane, who had purchased the airplane several months earlier and did not hold a rating for airplane single-engine sea, departed the lakefront grass runway and performed a sharp left turn to assume his enroute heading without retracting the airplane’s landing gear. The pilot reported that, about halfway through the turn, the engine exhibited a sudden loss of power but continued running with excessive vibration. Remedial actions to restore power were unsuccessful. The pilot stated that he selected a forced landing site on the lake and moved the landing gear selector to the “up” position with “about 25 ft of altitude nearing 50 mph of airspeed.” Photographs taken by a witness showed that the airplane contacted the water with the landing gear extended. The pilot stated that the airplane pitched forward upon water contact and came to rest upright in the water with substantial damage to the fuselage and right wing strut. Months before the accident, the pilot experienced a power loss event with the airplane that he and other owners of the same airplane make/model could not diagnose, ultimately agreeing that it was a case of the fuel tank unporting due to a low fuel state. Immediately after the accident, the pilot started the engine several times, but it would “choke out” each time. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed a gascolator occluded by rusty particles and containing water and trace amounts of fuel. The pilot reported that he was unaware of this gascolator in the fuel system, and that its occlusion could have led to both engine power loss events. The owner declined to test run the engine after clearing the gascolator of contaminants, citing fears of further damage to the airplane since the engine was loose on its mounts.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to configure the amphibious airplane’s landing gear before conducting a forced landing to a lake after a loss of engine power. Also causal was the occluded gascolator and the pilot’s lack of knowledge about the airplane’s fuel system, which resulted in his failure to locate and identify the condition of the gascolator following a previous loss of engine power event.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA23LA262
- Event ID
- 20230608192333
- Case number
- ERA23LA262
- 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: 3bd59c87fe0b56e94d23e4aef8afe75de5fbc32cc1a62fcf193aaea1ec614770; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:42:27.266Z.