FTW97LA244 · Cessna 152
Bridgeport Flight Training Cessna 152 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Perot Field/Fort Worth Alliance Airport (AFW) to IF9 · Bridgeport, TX
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW97LA244
- 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 152
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 152
- 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
- N69073
- Operator
- Bridgeport Flight Training
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Perot Field/Fort Worth Alliance Airport (AFW), ALLIANCE, TXTo IF9 · Bridgeport, TX
- 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 › Refueling, not performed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot's initial solo cross-country flight was intended to follow a 122 nautical mile VFR round trip course which was planned to take about 1 hour and 40 minutes. During the return leg, the pilot became lost and landed at a different airport, located about 20 miles from her intended destination. She took off again to try to get back to her destination, and while en route, the engine lost power. During the ensuing forced landing, the airplane skidded along a roadway and struck a utility pole. The aircraft had been operating for about 3 hours and 15 minutes before the loss of power. According to refueling records, the pilot originally departed with about 19 to 20 gallons of fuel on board. The engine's fuel burn for normal cruise was about 6 gallons per hour. No usable fuel was found in the tanks at the accident site.
Probable cause
fuel exhaustion, due to the pilot's failure to refuel before taking off on the remainder of the flight after making a precautionary landing. Factors related to the accident were: the pilot becoming lost and disoriented, and the lack of suitable terrain for a forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW97LA244
- Event ID
- 20001208X08365
- Case number
- FTW97LA244
- 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: fc32bdd570b30432ec420f62b9103b60703f4e91f91a23ccc495497b248e5e90; retrieved 2026-09-21T21:23:41.630Z.