DEN03LA021 · Piper PA-28-180
Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Laramie Regional Airport (LAR) to Provo Municipal Airport (PVU)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN03LA021
- 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
Piper PA-28-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N9020J
- Operator
- Kevin Lebaron
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Laramie Regional Airport (LAR), Laramie, WYTo Provo Municipal Airport (PVU), Provo, UT
- 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
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, improper
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot took off for his destination airport after waiting 2 hours at an intermediate stop due to weather. Approaching Vernal, Utah, the pilot said he encountered weather again. He deviated south and then back north trying to locate a path around the weather. He said he burned an hour's worth of fuel during the deviation. The pilot said he looked at his fuel and determined that he would need to land and get gas. The pilot said there was a layer of fog over the valley and over Vernal Airport. The pilot deviated first to Shane, Utah, then went to Roosevelt, Utah, and then back northeast toward Vernal. At that time he noted he had 7 gallons of fuel remaining. As the pilot was preparing to land at Vernal, the airplane ran out of gas on one tank. Approximately 4 miles southwest of the Vernal Airport, the pilot said he ran out of gas on the other tank. The pilot said he came out of the clouds 400 feet above a highway. He said there was mountainous terrain all around him. The pilot said he saw a plateau ahead. He said he pulled the airplane up and put it down on the plateau, breaking the landing gear aft and crushing the firewall and bottom fuselage upward and aft. An examination of the airplane revealed there was no fuel in either fuel tank. An examination of the engine and other airplane systems revealed no anomalies.
Probable cause
the pilot's improper in-flight planning/decision. Factors contributing to the accident were fuel exhaustion and the fog.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN03LA021
- Event ID
- 20021205X05570
- Case number
- DEN03LA021
- 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: 08d2fbd2e95c2e0c7ee9d6a3c737c613dff58fe67089f54c5ab260a425f8ffd1; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:34:24.411Z.