MIA03FA054 · Cessna 170A
Cessna 170A · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From 21S · Clewiston, FL to North Perry Airport (HWO)
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA03FA054
- 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 170A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 170
- 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
- N9701A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 21S · Clewiston, FLTo North Perry Airport (HWO), Pembroke Pines, FL
- 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; Wire, transmission
- 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, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Preflight planning/preparation, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The passenger, the pilot's daughter, stated to a Florida Highway Patrol officer that she and her father, the pilot/owner of the accident airplane had departed from Airglades Airport, Clewiston, Florida after a morning of sky-diving. She stated to the officer that they were en route to North Perry Airport, Pembroke Pines, Florida when their airplane ran out of fuel. She further stated that the pilot tried to restart the engine, but was unable, and was making a forced landing onto Interstate 75, when he struck a set of power lines which cross the roadway. After impacting the wires the airplane pitched down and impacted the road, and as a result, the pilot received serious injuries, and she received minor injuries. The airplane incurred substantial damage. Examination of the acident airplane revealed that there was no fuel in the airplane's tanks, and no preaccident anomalies were found to exist wit the airplane its flight controls or its engine.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper preflight planning and his inadequate in-flight planning decision which resulted in loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion and collision with wires and a road during the subsequent forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA03FA054
- Event ID
- 20030212X00208
- Case number
- MIA03FA054
- 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: 721e2b6d04fed0a6b96272d69919d5139af00576a22f1b0374460b4ec967551d; retrieved 2026-09-21T09:31:18.917Z.