A single-engine plane that crashed a year ago in Susquehanna County went down because the pilot never checked the plane’s fuel tanks.
The tanks had mysteriously taken on water that eventually froze and stopped the engine, according to a National Transportation Safety Board report.
When the engine stalled about 8,500 feet above sea level, pilot Kyle Parker maneuvered the Cessna 210L downward through 1,500-foot-thick clouds until he found Route 706 in Bridgewater Twp. As Mr. Parker tried to land, the plane clipped an unmarked power line that hovered over the road.
The plane banked to the right about 40 degrees, and as Mr. Parker corrected for the banking, the plane hit the ground, landing upright with two landing gears partially off the road, the NTSB report says.
Remarkably, Mr. Parker suffered only an unspecified minor injury and was released from a local hospital later that day.
The crash happened about 2:50 a.m. Nov. 28, 2013, as Mr. Parker delivered cargo. He took off from Teterboro Airport in Teterboro, New Jersey, and was headed for Buffalo Niagara International Airport in Buffalo, New York.
Mr. Parker told investigators he filled the plane’s two fuel tanks in Teterboro but did not check for contaminants, a federally required procedure and one done manually for smaller planes.
He said he was not in a hurry, but his “cargo arrived at the same time he finished fueling,” the NTSB report says.
He tested the engine before leaving and encountered no problems. He switched the fuel flow to the engine from the right to the left tank mid-flight.
About 20 minutes later, he heard a sound and noticed the engine and exhaust gas temperatures had dropped to the lowest point on the scale, even though fuel flow was up. The engine had lost power. He tried switching the fuel flow back to the right tank, adjusted the fuel-air mixture and set the fuel pump at low and high settings.
Nothing worked.
Unable to maintain altitude, he set a course for an airport 25 or 30 miles to the north, but realized he was descending too quickly and wouldn’t reach there. He targeted another road, but realized he couldn’t reach there, either. After descending through the clouds, he spotted a field and the road where he eventually landed.
Plane maintenance staff later found ice blocking the fuel tank’s drain as they tried to remove fuel. They found a quarter-inch icicle and 3/16-inch ice pellets in the left tank, and more ice in the right tank. A fuel strainer contained 50 percent water, 50 percent fuel.
The NTSB was unable to determine how the water entered the tanks. The fuel truck supplied other planes that had no problems, and the seals on the fuel filler caps and the fuel tank sump drain were “satisfactory.”
Contact the writer:
bkrawczeniuk@timesshamrock.com