ANC01LA054 · Cessna 172
Cessna 172 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From CANTWELL, AK to Soldotna Airport (PASX)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC01LA054
- 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
- Unknown
- 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 172
- 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
- N5530T
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From CANTWELL, AKTo Soldotna Airport (PASX), Soldotna, AK
- 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; Stall/mush
- 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 performed
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The day before the accident, the private certificated pilot with one passenger, departed on a cross-country flight, but encountered poor weather conditions along the route. The pilot elected to land on a roadway and spent the night at a lodge. The following day, the pilot departed from the road without adding fuel, and headed for his destination. As the flight approached the destination airport, the airplane was cruising about 1,500 feet. About 4 miles from the airport, the engine lost power, and the pilot headed for an ultralight landing strip, located adjacent to the main destination runway. The runway surface was occupied by vehicles and pedestrians and the pilot began a turn to the left. About 20 feet above the ground, the airplane stalled and descended to the ground in a nose down attitude. The fuel selector was found on the left tank. The left fuel tank did not contain any fuel. The right fuel tank contained a small amount of fuel. The pilot said he always leaves the fuel tank selector on "BOTH" but the selector must have inadvertently been moved during the flight. During the emergency, the pilot said he did not check the position of the fuel selector.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to refuel the airplane, and subsequent fuel exhaustion. A factor in the accident was an inadvertent stall during an emergency descent/landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC01LA054
- Event ID
- 20010509X00919
- Case number
- ANC01LA054
- 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, coordinates. 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: d6cfb419dc3df1ce4a3d6f7173888780ad8b59f6fa47d98dae3b2332e6944de7; retrieved 2026-09-21T10:08:50.432Z.