ERA25LA186 · Beech 95-C55
Beech 95-C55 · Accident: fuel starvation on approach
From Gallia Meigs Regional Airport (GAS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA25LA186
- 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
Beech 95-C55
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 55
- 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
- N591R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gallia Meigs Regional Airport (GAS), Gallipolis, OHTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 59 years (built 1966)
- 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
- 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
- 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
The pilot of the multi-engine airplane reported that while returning to the departure airport at an altitude of 3,000 ft mean sea level, he began to make a left banking turn when the left engine experienced a total loss of power. He immediately feathered the propeller and applied power to the right engine, which was also no longer producing power, and he realized that both engines had lost power. The pilot attempted to maintain control of the airplane while searching for an adequate landing location, but ultimately landed in heavily wooded terrain. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the fuselage, empennage, horizontal stabilizer, and both wings. A postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the left auxiliary fuel tank was about ¾-full of fuel, while the right auxiliary tank was about ½-full of fuel. Both main fuel tanks contained no fuel. After the accident, the pilot articulated that the reason for the loss of engine power was fuel starvation. Based on the (inaccurate) fuel quantity indicators in the cockpit, he believed that each main fuel tank was between ¼- and ½-full. He did not visually look inside of the fuel tanks during the preflight inspection and that he did not get fuel before departing. The pilot also described that he should have immediately switched to auxiliary fuel tanks following the losses of engine power.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate preflight inspection, and inadequate inflight fuel management, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel starvation and subsequent forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA25LA186
- Event ID
- 20250425200067
- Case number
- ERA25LA186
- 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, coordinates, 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: 9d88b7c71cd1484c2e3554d325d9fad188bda672489faab90e041cccc2b3dd5f; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:51:01.766Z.