CEN25LA393 · Floyd G Halderman JR RV-6
Floyd G Halderman JR RV-6 · Accident: fuel starvation on approach
From Anoka County-Blaine (Janes Field) Airport (ANE) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN25LA393
- 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
Floyd G Halderman JR RV-6
- Aircraft type
- Floyd G Halderman JR RV-6
- 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
- N851FH
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Anoka County-Blaine (Janes Field) Airport (ANE), Blaine, MNTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 7 years (built 2018)
- 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 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 › Aircraft systems
- 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 reported that he and a group of other pilots had recently purchased the airplane. He noted that the airplane’s fuel selector was difficult to turn. A new selector valve was planned for installation but had not yet been installed. During the accident flight, when he was nearing his destination, the pilot switched to the fullest fuel tank. When the airplane was on final approach the engine lost all power, and the pilot executed a forced landing short of the intended runway. The airplane nosed over during the forced landing and sustained substantial damage to the right wing and vertical stabilizer. After the accident, when the pilot was securing the airplane, he recognized that the selector valve was not fully open, and this had led to the loss of engine power due to fuel starvation. The pilot noted in his accident report narrative that the valve was difficult to rotate and also difficult to determine if it was in a detent position, and that he should have grounded the airplane until the replacement selector valve was installed. No service documentation for the fuel selector valve was found during the investigation. Ensuring operation of the valve should be part of the condition inspection for the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot’s continued operation of the faulty fuel selector valve which resulted in a loss of engine power due to fuel starvation. Contributing to the accident was the degraded operation of the fuel selector valve and the pilot’s poor decision to operate the airplane without first addressing the maintenance issue.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN25LA393
- Event ID
- 20250925201720
- Case number
- CEN25LA393
- 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: b62f8a0fc09eb6443b57f2adc289b7f35165cd28055ccd971a31256413a33768; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:23:05.427Z.