Oakland – Honolulu – Majuro – Suva – Auckland

On March 16, 1995 at 05:15 AM, Oakland – Honolulu – Majuro – Suva – Auckland experienced a crash involving De Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter, operated by Great Barrier Airlines, with the event recorded near Pacific Ocean All World.

The flight was categorized as delivery and the reported phase was flight at a lake, sea, ocean, river crash site.

3 people were known to be on board, 0 fatalities were recorded, 3 survivors were identified or estimated. This corresponds to an estimated fatality rate of 0.0%.

Crew on board: 3, crew fatalities: 0, passengers on board: 0, passenger fatalities: 0, other fatalities: 0.

The listed crash cause is human factor. The aircraft departed overweight for a 17-hour ferry flight. Early in the flight the crew experienced some fuel problems and decided to continue when they resolved the problem. The crew indicated the en route winds were close to forecast. The ferry fuel system is a simple 5- tank gravity fuel feed into the fore and aft main tanks. About 6 hours from destination, they realized the ferry tanks were not flowing into the main tanks as planned. They began manually transferring fuel from the rear ferry tank to the forward ferry tank, and shut down the right engine to reduce fuel consumption. This did not stop the negative fuel flow from the main tanks. At the time of ditching, the crew estimated the fuel remaining in the ferry tanks was about 170 gallons, most of which was in the 3 aft ferry tanks. An aero engineer calculated that the aircraft was at least 10 inches behind the maximum aft cg at the time of ditching, and suggested that the ferry fuel system was not managed to maintain the cg within the allowable limits, a task made more difficult with the rear fuselage cargo.

Aircraft reference details include registration N37ST, MSN 207, year of manufacture 1969.