LAX05LA075 · Piper PA-25-235
Great Western Soaring Piper PA-25-235 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) during initial climb
From Crystal Airport (46CN) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX05LA075
- 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-25-235
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-25
- 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
- N6745Z
- Operator
- Great Western Soaring
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Crystal Airport (46CN), Llano, CATo 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
- Initial climb
- 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 › Fuel supply, not verified
- 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
Following a loss of engine power, the airplane collided with a sign, crushing the left wing, while the pilot was performing a forced landing on a road. After departing, with a glider in tow, the pilot entered a climb in an effort to reach an adequate altitude for the glider to release from the line. Upon reaching 1,000 feet above ground level (agl), the airplane's engine abruptly lost power. The glider released from the tow line and the pilot maneuvered the airplane towards a road. On the landing roll the left wing impacted a sign located on the side of the road, and the airplane ground looped. During a post-accident examination, investigators drained several ounces of fuel from gascolator, and the remaining fuel from the carburetor (less than a pint), noting no anomalies. The intact fuel tank contained no fuel and there was no evidence of in flight fuel leakage from the fuel strainer or tank. The engine started with no difficulties and preformed normally at several different power settings. The airplane had been flown 1.4 hours since the last refueling. According to the manufacturer, the engine consumes about 23 gallons of fuel per hour at maximum power of 2,575 revolutions per minute (rpm), and 19 gallons an hour at 2,500 rpm. The pilot thought that the airplane had an estimated 10 gallons of fuel on board prior to his last departure, but noted that the fuel gauge was unreliable. The accident flight lasted approximately 30 minutes, which would have resulted in the consumption of 9.5 gallons of fuel utilizing the 19-gallon/hour fuel consumption rate.
Probable cause
the pilot's inadequate preflight planning and failure to verify the amount of fuel onboard the airplane prior to departure, which resulted in loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX05LA075
- Event ID
- 20050126X00108
- Case number
- LAX05LA075
- 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: b441a9b1f1037f9c1b1314f37a250cf82b5763782f07604e0166b92eaad4f743; retrieved 2026-09-22T06:19:46.441Z.