IAD99LA001 · Cessna 172K
Cessna 172K · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) during initial climb
From 7G8 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD99LA001
- 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 172K
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N78624
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 7G8To 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Fuel system › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › Aircraft preflight, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After purchasing the airplane, the pilot took off without visually checking the fuel level in the tanks. After flying locally and landing at his home airport, the pilot elected to perform one more take off and landing. During the initial climb out, about 300 feet agl, the engine lost power. Past midfield and unable to land on the remaining runway, the pilot made a left 90 degree turn. Faced with an unsuitable landing area, the pilot turned right 45 degrees to land diagonally in a small field. The pilot was unable to stop the airplane prior to impacting a tree with the left wing. Upon examination of the airplane, no mechanical malfunctions were found with the airframe or the engine. A total of 1.5 gallons of fuel was drained from both tanks. The airplane's Pilot's Operating Handbook listed the unusable fuel as 3 gallons.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight inspection which resulted in fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD99LA001
- Event ID
- 20001211X11270
- Case number
- IAD99LA001
- 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: 4ee4101b76b85f430d7a6d605735229783c9a2ba5995a125091ad2e0d576fe1f; retrieved 2026-09-22T16:35:22.852Z.