ANC95LA160 · Cessna 172N
Cessna 172N · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Kenai Municipal Airport (ENA) to Gulkana Airport (GKN)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC95LA160
- 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
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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 172N
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N737SP
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Kenai Municipal Airport (ENA), Kenai, AKTo Gulkana Airport (GKN), GLENALLEN, AK
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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
- First occurrenceThe 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
- Total loss of engine power (non-mechanical)
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Fuel exhaustion
- 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
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › Fuel supply, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Planning/decision, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot and passenger departed on a cross-country flight with less than full fuel in the airplane. The airplane had a fuel capacity of 42 gallons with 4 gallons being unusable. The pilot estimated that the airplane had 30 to 32 gallons of fuel when he departed. The airplane's Lycoming O-320 engine had been replaced with a (larger) Lycoming O-360 engine. The pilot made one intermediate stop due to poor weather conditions. After departure toward the intended destination, the engine suddenly lost power. Efforts to restore power were not successful. The pilot made a forced landing into remote and rough terrain with the airplane coming to rest inverted. Total time of this flight was 2.3 hours. Total flight time since the airplane was refueled was 3.5 hours. Aircraft recovery personnel reported that no fuel was present in the airplane. A postaccident inspection of the airplane did not reveal any engine mechanical malfunction.
Probable cause
Improper planning/decision by the pilot, which resulted in fuel exhaustion, due to an inadequate supply of fuel. A factor relating to the accident was: the lack of suitable terrain for an emergency landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC95LA160
- Event ID
- 20001207X04403
- Case number
- ANC95LA160
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1995-09-08.
- API snapshot SHA-256: b87c1f9e551d360470826f8f621c4909e21a6d70b45ad868a2a7e98d9428c10a; retrieved 2026-09-21T13:05:12.187Z.