CHI99LA034 · Piper PA-12
Piper PA-12 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Sauk Centre Municipal Airport (D39) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI99LA034
- 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-12
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-12
- 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
- N92585
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sauk Centre Municipal Airport (D39), SAUK CENTER, MNTo 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 · 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 › Preflight planning/preparation, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot said he added 5-gallons of auto fuel to the left and right wing tanks before departure. He said he didn't visually check the fuel, but felt it with his finger in each fuel tank. While enroute to the destination airport, the engine stopped operating when the airplane was about 8-minutes north of the airport, according to the pilot. The pilot said he landed the airplane on a down-sloped field. As the airplane approached the end of the field the pilot said he applied elevator back-pressure to get the airplane to jump the ditches at its end. The airplane landed on a gravel road and bounced onto a plowed field, nosing over. The on-scene investigation revealed empty fuel tanks. The right wing had a colored stain similar to fuel that started at the fuel filler neck and went aft to the trailing edge. There was no colored stain near the left wing's fuel filler neck.
Probable cause
the pilot's inadequate preflight inpection of the fuel tanks and filler neck caps before departure. Factors associated with this accident were the leaking right wing fuel tank filler cap and fuel exhaution.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI99LA034
- Event ID
- 20001211X11389
- Case number
- CHI99LA034
- 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: db9956491e31f1c6311b5215367870212047b1b50cf40c4a8923c2a1aa9417fa; retrieved 2026-09-22T16:17:48.736Z.