IAD98LA073 · Saab-Scania AB (Saab) F-35 DRAKEN F-35 DRAKE
Saab-Scania AB (Saab) F-35 DRAKEN F-35 DRAKE · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Newport News Williamsburg International Airport (PHF) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD98LA073
- 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
Saab-Scania AB (Saab) F-35 DRAKEN F-35 DRAKE
- Aircraft type
- Saab Scania Ab (saab) F-35
- 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
- N156XD
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Newport News Williamsburg International Airport (PHF), Williamsburg, VATo not recorded
- 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 · climb to 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
- Loss of engine power
- 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 › Fuel management, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was conducting the second of two support flights for a U.S. Navy ship. On each flight, he made three passes. Following the last pass of the second flight, the pilot made a 5g pull-up. Once 'on top', he noted that the airplane's fuel quantity was rapidly going down. The pilot declared an emergency, and climbed the airplane to 35,000 feet, where the engine flamed out. He established a 300-knot glide, and was vectored to a naval air station. He stated that the airplane either reached, or was above three 'key' positions, and on airspeed. However, after the third key, he realized the airplane would not reach a runway, so he successfully ejected less than 50 feet above the ground. The airplane impacted a plowed field, and remained upright until it skidded to a stop. There was no post-impact fire, and there was no evidence of fuel leakage, nor of the failure of any airframe component. The second flight was about 15 minutes longer than the first. With the airplane's capacitance fuel indicating system; high speed flight fuel quantity indications could be inaccurate. The 2,700-hour pilot had 43 hours of flight time in make and model.
Probable cause
The pilot-in-command's inadequate fuel management which led to fuel exhaustion and subsequent loss of engine power. A related factor was the pilot's unfamiliarity with the fuel system.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD98LA073
- Event ID
- 20001211X10335
- Case number
- IAD98LA073
- 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: d212dad82f571cb03d014cf2de416b44a9da251e613dde988bc4e106c2271d9c; retrieved 2026-09-22T17:37:09.806Z.