IAD04LA028 · Cessna 150
Cessna 150 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Greenville Municipal Airport (3B1) to Spencer Airport (60M)
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD04LA028
- 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 150
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 150
- 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
- N5058R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Greenville Municipal Airport (3B1), Greenville, METo Spencer Airport (60M), Spencer, MA
- 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; Tree(s)
- 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 › Preflight planning/preparation, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the preflight inspection of the airplane, the pilot, through the use of a stick-type fuel gage, determined that the right fuel tank contained 7 gallons of fuel, and that the left fuel tank was full. While he had flown the route in the past, on the accident flight, he climbed the airplane to 8,500 feet, which he had never done before, and subsequently descended incrementally until in the vicinity of the destination airport. During the final descent, and after 2 hours 44 minutes of flight, the engine stopped and could not be restarted. Due to the terrain, the pilot performed a forced landing into trees. Based on previous flights, he had planned that the engine to consume an average of 6 gallons of fuel per hour, and for the total flight time to be 2 hours 40 minutes. The fuel gauge, which the pilot used to determine the amount of fuel onboard prior to takeoff, was calibrated for a different model airplane that had the same size fuel tank, but a greater amount of useable fuel than the accident airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight planning, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion and a subsequent forced landing. Factors included the pilot's use of a fuel gauge that was calibrated for a different model airplane, and a lack of suitable terrain for the forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD04LA028
- Event ID
- 20040712X00945
- Case number
- IAD04LA028
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2004-07-05.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 0d06bb3af8ff621367734599267eba65d04f9f4cb8ff9cf59e01275bb5995964; retrieved 2026-09-22T07:09:40.267Z.