SEA01LA110 · Cessna 172M
Cessna 172M · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Great Falls International Airport (GTF) to Pocatello Regional Airport (PIH)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA01LA110
- 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 172M
- 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
- CFDGH
- Operator
- Danyluk, Victor · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Great Falls International Airport (GTF), Great Falls, MTTo Pocatello Regional Airport (PIH), Pocatello, ID
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Refueling, not performed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed Edmonton, Canada, with his passenger in the Cessna 172M, with 48 gallons of usable fuel aboard. The trip included 2 stops before terminating at the end of the first day having flown 3 hours and 34 minutes. The pilot added 12 gallons of fuel at his stopover. The following day he and his passenger departed on the next leg of the trip (Great Falls, MT, to Pocatello, ID). The engine quit after not less than 6 hours 51 minutes of operation on a total of 60 gallons of usable fuel. On site examination revealed no evidence of fuel in either fuel tank or spilled/leaked at the site, and only 4.5 ounces of fuel were retrieved from fuel lines. The landing site was characterized by soft furrows in a field and the furrows were observed to change direction (from parallel) during the ground roll of the aircraft. The pilot reported in a written statement that "...The pilot had thoughts of landing at Idaho Falls but decided to fly as flight planned...!"
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate in-flight decision by failing to refuel while en route, resulting in fuel exhaustion and the loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA01LA110
- Event ID
- 20010608X01131
- Case number
- SEA01LA110
- 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: 47a5aa1a134fd568722b6ea2d0ee13ce734e3987469e879cd26eb57561864ee2; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:54:56.212Z.