CHI01LA285 · Waters Avid Bandit
Waters Avid Bandit · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Canton-Plymouth-Mettetal Airport (1D2) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI01LA285
- 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
Waters Avid Bandit
- Aircraft type
- Waters AVID BANDIT
- 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
- N62PT
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Canton-Plymouth-Mettetal Airport (1D2), Plymoth, MITo 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
- Loss of engine power
- 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
- Fuel system › Starvation
- Pilot in command › Fuel consumption calculations, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane experienced a loss of engine power during cruise flight and was substantially damaged during a forced landing. The pilot reported, "... I noticed uneven fuel usage from tanks. Decision made to return to airport immediately, but engine quit en route." He attempted an engine re-start but was unsuccessful. He executed a forced landing to a racetrack. He reported the airplane collided with a concrete building. The airplane had no fuel in the right tank and 8 gallons of fuel in the left tank. No fuel leak was observed. The pilot reported that during the flight, he had the right wing fuel selector ON and the left wing fuel selector OFF. He forgot to select the left wing fuel selector to ON, and when the right wing fuel tank ran out of fuel, the engine quit. The pilot reported there were no mechanical malfunctions.
Probable cause
fuel starvation due to the pilot's improper fuel calculations. A factor was the concrete building.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI01LA285
- Event ID
- 20010823X01760
- Case number
- CHI01LA285
- 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: 6d3da146920b22122d0ccbabcfec7c1d5ed06d1d37e8e19ed2d122b6eb46e53d; retrieved 2026-09-21T09:52:42.242Z.