WPR25LA071 · Cessna T210L
Cessna T210L · Accident: fuel related on approach
From Lake Havasu City Airport (HII) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR25LA071
- 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
Cessna T210L
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- 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
- N505SW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Havasu City Airport (HII), Lake Havasu City, AZTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 48 years (built 1976)
- 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 · VFR pattern final
- 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 related
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Wire
- 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 › Action/decision
- 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
Before departing on a cross-country flight, the pilot fueled the airplane with about 20 gallons of fuel, using the airplane’s gauges to determine the airplane’s fuel quantity, which she believed to be 70 gallons. The pilot did not look inside the fuel tanks to verify the fuel quantity before departure. After about two hours of flight, while on approach to the destination airport, the engine lost total power and the pilot was unable to restore engine power or glide to the runway. During the subsequent forced landing in a vacant lot, the airplane impacted powerlines and rough terrain, resulting in substantial damage to the fuselage and right wing. According to the pilot, an unknown quantity of fuel was observed to leak from the airplane’s lower forward fuselage after the accident. During the airplane’s recovery from the accident site, only trace amounts of fuel were found within the fuel system. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed no evidence of a preexisting malfunction or failure that would have precluded normal operation, and a test run of the engine revealed no anomalies. The left-side fuel system was unobstructed and undamaged with exception of the left-side fuel reservoir tank, located in the lower forward fuselage, which displayed fuel staining and damage consistent with impact. No damage or voids were found in the right-side fuel system. As there were no mechanical anomalies with the engine or right-side fuel system, and there was no evidence to suggest that the left-side fuel system was compromised before impact, the engine likely lost power due to the pilot’s improper fuel management. The penetrated left side fuel reservoir tank was located at a low point in the fuel system relative to the left-wing fuel tank and leaked an unknown quantity of fuel at the accident site. The investigation could not determine if the loss of power was due to fuel starvation or exhaustion, as the remaining fuel quantity in the left tank at the time of the accident is unknown.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper fuel management, which resulted in a total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR25LA071
- Event ID
- 20241231199497
- Case number
- WPR25LA071
- 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 2024-12-28.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 431ca1158688a900ae536079feac1528e17de71189b65a9aeed0c450d01770c3; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:34:32.408Z.