FTW99LA273 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From 8F7 · Decatur, TX to Town & Country Airpark (F82)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW99LA273
- 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
- N5399B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 8F7 · Decatur, TXTo Town & Country Airpark (F82), Lubbock, 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 obtained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane's nose landing gear struck a dike and the airplane flipped to the inverted position during a forced landing following a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion. The solo student pilot/owner did not refuel the airplane before departing on the second leg of the round trip cross country flight. No physical evidence of fuel or compromise of the integrity of the fuel system was observed at the accident site. Total fuel capacity for the airplane is 39 gallons (37.5 usable fuel) and about 2 gallons of fuel was drained from the tanks. The student pilot based his calculated fuel consumption on cruise performance at 4.7 gallons per hour for a pressure altitude of 8,000 feet; however, the Cessna 152 performance chart indicates a fuel burn of 4.9 gallons per hour. Further, the pilot did not calculate the climb performance to cruise altitude. When asked how the accident could have been prevented, the pilot stated, 'I could have topped off the tanks before the return trip.'
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to refuel the airplane resulting in fuel exhaustion. Factors were the pilot's inadequate preflight planning and the lack of suitable terrain for the forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW99LA273
- Event ID
- 20001212X19779
- Case number
- FTW99LA273
- 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: 2e71231df85fa5c322330b10ecdb2084e179ebf2ab842fcee17bd456eeb188b0; retrieved 2026-09-22T13:58:43.850Z.