MIA97LA194 · Piper PA-28-181
Piper PA-28-181 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Savannah Hilton Head International Airport (SAV) to General Dewitt Spain Airport (M01)
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA97LA194
- 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
Piper PA-28-181
- 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
- N3692M
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Savannah Hilton Head International Airport (SAV), SAVANNAH, GATo General Dewitt Spain Airport (M01), Memphis, TN
- 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
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, poor
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight departed with full fuel tanks for the planned 4 hour 33 minute flight. Three hours 36 minutes into the flight about 49 nautical miles from the destination airport, the pilot requested to descend to 3,500 feet. The performance chart indicates the descent to begin 41.5 nautical miles. About 9 minutes later the pilot noted that the fuel gauges were indicating low and the flight descended to 1,800 feet. The flight continued and about 14 minutes later, the engine sputtered. The pilot repositioned the fuel selector, advised the controller of this who vectored the airplane toward a nearby airport, and shortly after, about 4 hours after takeoff, the engine quit. Unable to land at the vectored airport the pilot selected a field with a resulting hard landing. Postcrash examination of the airplane revealed fuel exhaustion. The carburetor was tested, and near the power setting set by the pilot during the cruise portion the fuel flow was found to be 3.0 pounds-per-hour high due to a failed spring inside the carburetor. The carburetor was 20 years 4 months old and was never overhauled since manufacture although there is no mandatory requirement. Examination of the carburetor revealed evidence of a fuel leak due to 1 loose carburetor bowl to body screw. The airplane was last inspected 5 days and 12 hours earlier in accordance with a 100-Hour inspection but the carburetor was not further examined.
Probable cause
The poor in-flight planning by the pilot for her failure to divert to an alternate airport after recognizing that a low fuel quantity state existed when preflight and in-flight planning revealed sufficient fuel for the flight. Contributing to the accident was the inadequate 100-Hour inspection of the airplane by company maintenance personnel for their failure to note an external fuel leak at the carburetor. Also, fatigue failure of the air metering pin return spring which resulted in excessive fuel flow at cruise power setting and subsequent fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA97LA194
- Event ID
- 20001208X08199
- Case number
- MIA97LA194
- 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: 3ceae6baf5928a6454e358960af89581a1facaafaddf59f5ad92d199a63ecba3; retrieved 2026-09-22T19:23:56.300Z.