LAX99LA269 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From LII · Lake Havasu City, AZ to Glendale Municipal Airport (GEU)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX99LA269
- 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
- N49100
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From LII · Lake Havasu City, AZTo Glendale Municipal Airport (GEU), Glendale, AZ
- 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 · descent
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › Fuel consumption calculations, inaccurate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While inbound to his destination, the pilot reported that the engine began to miss. It resumed running a couple of times but finally stopped altogether. The pilot made a forced landing on a dirt road, damaging the aircraft. The aircraft was last serviced with 20.8 gallons of aviation fuel on the previous day. The pilot computed the fuel requirement for the flight by using the fuel consumption chart in the pilot operator's handbook. After a flight of 0.2 hours on the day before, the pilot estimated that he had 3 hours 55 minutes of fuel remaining (without reserve) for his cross-country flight. At the time the engine quit, the Hobbs meter showed that a total of 3 hours 36 minutes had elapsed. The average fuel consumption for the fuel load was 6.8 gallons per hour. The fuel capacity of the aircraft is 26 gallons with 1.5 gallons unusable. When asked about his planning, he acknowledged that his planning estimate of 6 gallons per hour had not considered the additional fuel requirements for his initial takeoff and climb, nor the seven other landings and takeoffs that he subsequently made since his last refueling. According to the POH performance charts, start, taxi, and takeoff requires 0.8-gallons of fuel. Aircraft retrieval personnel recovered less than 2 gallons of fuel from both of the main tanks and the fuel system was found to be intact. Safety Board investigators successfully started and ran the engine after the accident.
Probable cause
fuel exhaustion due to the pilot's inaccurate fuel consumption calculations used in flight planning.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX99LA269
- Event ID
- 20001212X19557
- Case number
- LAX99LA269
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1999-08-14.
- API snapshot SHA-256: f1d85dfc598f54e6c1228029c127f100d8a5f7a0476c71d2189be19f18280f68; retrieved 2026-09-22T14:18:04.135Z.