IAD97LA074 · American AA-1
American AA-1 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From N92 · Middletown, NJ to Raleigh County Memorial Airport (BKW)
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD97LA074
- 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
American AA-1
- Aircraft type
- American AA-1
- 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
- N5734L
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From N92 · Middletown, NJTo Raleigh County Memorial Airport (BKW), BECKLY, WV
- 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)
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Fuel system › Exhaustion
- Fuel system, cap › Missing
- Pilot in command › Aircraft preflight, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was en route to his destination with a planned stopover airport. Due to weather, the pilot switched his stopover airport and obtained the local weather. At that time, the pilot checked the right fuel tank and found it half full. Minutes later, the right fuel tank sight gauge indicated empty. Not sure how much fuel was onboard, the pilot radioed Air Traffic Control and stated that he was fuel critical. Shortly afterwards, the engine lost power and the pilot switched to the left tank. After a brief period, the engine lost power once again, and the pilot switched back to the right fuel tank. The engine produced power for a short period, and then lost power once more. Unable to restart the engine, the pilot executed a forced landing to a small pasture. The left main and nose gears collapsed on impact and the airplane slid through a wooden post supporting a metal wire fence coming to rest upright, on the reciprocal heading. Inspection of the engine found no anomalies. No useable fuel was found onboard. The right fuel tank cap was missing and was not found in the impact area.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight, which led to the loss of a fuel cap and subsequent fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD97LA074
- Event ID
- 20001208X07937
- Case number
- IAD97LA074
- 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: be76166b8c9a924e3c9df21f26ad48eda0a805366f3dd3b1cece91ff24c4189f; retrieved 2026-09-22T19:44:03.153Z.