CHI96FA316 · Piper PA-28-180
Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Mackinac County Airport (83D) to Fulton County Airport (RCR)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI96FA316
- 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
- 1 · 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
Piper PA-28-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N9209J
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Mackinac County Airport (83D), MACKINAC ISLAND, MITo Fulton County Airport (RCR), Rochester, IN
- 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; Tree(s)
- 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 consumption calculations, inaccurate
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot said that he had flown the route several times before, and had planned the flight so that they would 'get back with 8/10th of an hour (of fuel) to spare.' While in cruise flight, at 3,000 feet mean sea level, the airplane's engine lost power. The pilot said that he switched tanks and started looking for a place to land. The passenger said that he saw something, perhaps a field, off of the right side of the airplane. The pilot turned the airplane toward the area. He could not make out anything. When the landing lights illuminated the trees, the pilot said he 'instinctively pulled back and tried to turn left. I hit the trees.' The airplane's elapsed time indicator read 2523.2 hours when the pilot signed out the airplane. It read 2529.9 when examined at the accident site. Examination of the wreckage showed no evidence of fuel in the fuel lines or the carburetor. Twenty ounces of fuel was recovered from the airplane's left wing tank. The pilot survived the accident and was found five days later by search and rescue personnel.
Probable cause
inaccurate fuel consumption calculations by the pilot before takeoff, and his improper decision not to land before his airplane ran out of fuel.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI96FA316
- Event ID
- 20001208X06430
- Case number
- CHI96FA316
- 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: investigation status. 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: fccfde3df458edb699e18800091c6787bbb9d08c68c2a199b0aaa8a5fe509d76; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:13:07.426Z.