ERA25LA274 · Cessna TP206C
Cessna TP206C · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Elkin Municipal Airport (ZEF) to Jasper County Airport (RZL)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA25LA274
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna TP206C
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 206
- 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
- N8670Z
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Elkin Municipal Airport (ZEF), Elkin, NCTo Jasper County Airport (RZL), Rensselaer, IN
- Aircraft age
- About 57 years (built 1968)
- 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 › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was on a multi-stop cross country flight, and after fueling the airplane, had departed for the next leg of the trip. While in cruise flight at an altitude of 11,500 ft msl, the pilot felt an engine vibration, and despite activating the alternate air, the vibration did not improve. He requested radar vectors from air traffic control to a nearby airport, and while descending through 3,500 ft, the engine lost power completely. The pilot then switched from the right to the left fuel tank, activated the fuel boost pump, and unsuccessfully attempted to restart the engine. He subsequently performed a forced landing to a field, during which the airplane’s horizontal stabilizer was substantially damaged. Following the accident, the pilot realized that the quantity of fuel available in the left tank was less than that tank’s unusable amount. With the right fuel tank selected, the engine was started and run with no anomalies noted. Based on this information, the loss of engine power that occurred during the accident flight was most likely the result of fuel starvation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s mismanagement of the airplane’s available fuel supply, which resulted in fuel starvation and a subsequent total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA25LA274
- Event ID
- 20250721200592
- Case number
- ERA25LA274
- 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: 25854bcdd8642c6c53668a2b5e8284afe8ab0024bb2925cad379973e652ab8dd; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:06:52.321Z.