CEN25LA301 · Cessna U206G
Cessna U206G · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Gillespie County Airport (T82) to Gillespie County Airport (T82)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN25LA301
- 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 U206G
- 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
- N756XY
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gillespie County Airport (T82), Fredericksburg, TXTo Gillespie County Airport (T82), Fredericksburg, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 47 years (built 1978)
- 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
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was planning an evening flight in the local area. The engine run-up, takeoff, and initial portion of the flight were normal. About 20 minutes after takeoff, the engine lost power. The pilot attempted to restore engine power by switching fuel tanks; however, those efforts were unsuccessful. He subsequently executed a forced landing to a road and during the rollout, the right wing impacted a tree. The airplane sustained substantial damage to both wings. A postaccident examination revealed a small amount of fuel remained in the left fuel tank, and the right tank contained less than one quart of fuel. The fuel tanks and fuel system were not compromised. The pilot reported checking the airplane fuel quantity before the flight using the cockpit gauges which indicated near full. He acknowledged that the fuel quantity was not visually checked during the preflight inspection, and that he relied solely on the fuel gauges. He added that the fuel gauges were unreliable in the past, and the fuel sender units had been replaced; however, the fuel gauges continued to “wobble significantly” after the sender units were replaced.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to confirm the fuel quantity before flight which resulted in a loss of engine power due to fuel starvation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN25LA301
- Event ID
- 20250804200692
- Case number
- CEN25LA301
- 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 2025-07-25.
- API snapshot SHA-256: fdb0df13739b2d141bfe6e74c4d077fe0e2f38e1401982c901479e2da169495c; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:10:02.888Z.