CEN24LA002 · Cessna 182R 1981
Cessna 182R 1981 · Accident: fuel starvation during landing
From Newton City-County Airport (EWK) to Johnson County Executive Airport (OJC)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN24LA002
- 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
Cessna 182R 1981
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N357HT
- Operator
- Mullenax Richard D
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Newton City-County Airport (EWK), Newton, KSTo Johnson County Executive Airport (OJC), Olathe, KS
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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
- Landing
- 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
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed on a 1 hour flight. When the airplane was on final approach at the destination airport, the pilot added power because the airplane was losing altitude. However, the engine did not respond to the increase in throttle and continued to sink. The airplane landed just short of the runway, flipped over, and came to rest inverted which resulted in substantial damage. The pilot turned the fuel selector valve to the off position immediately after the accident, so fuel selector position before the accident could not be confirmed. There was no fuel leaking out of the fuel tanks, and there was no fuel on the runway. Neither wing fuel tank was breached and when the wing tanks were drained following the accident, the right fuel tank had about 45 gallons of fuel and the left fuel tank was empty. According to the manufacturer’s pilot operating handbook (POH), each tank holds 46 gallons of fuel of which 44 gallons is usable fuel. The fuel tanks, fuel system, and engine were examined after the accident and no mechanical failures or malfunctions were found that would have precluded normal operation. Before departing for the 1 hour flight, the airplane was fueled with 20 gallons of fuel (10 gallons per side). The pilot said that with the 20 added gallons of fuel, he estimated that the plane had about 70 gallons (35 gallons per side) when he departed. Performance calculations revealed that total fuel consumed for the accident flight would have been between 9.3 to 13.4 gallons of fuel. If the airplane had 70 gallons of fuel when it departed, there should have been about 56 to 60 gallons of fuel remaining (28 to 30 gallons per side). Based on the left tank having no fuel in it after the accident and the right tank being full, it is likely that the pilot was operating on only the left fuel tank for several flights. When he departed on the accident flight, the left tank was filled with 10 gallons of fuel, which was about the amount the engine would have burned during the 1 hour flight..
Probable cause
The pilot’s mismanagement of the available fuel 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 CEN24LA002
- Event ID
- 20231002193175
- Case number
- CEN24LA002
- 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: 9b288d8ee77b2d236560abad36f2816a7c488927e21bde8af7e56828064e1e48; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:11:03.917Z.