CHI05CA087 · Piper PA-32-300
Piper PA-32-300 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Clark Regional Airport (JVY) to Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport (AZO)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI05CA087
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-32-300
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N722RM
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Clark Regional Airport (JVY), Jeffersonville, INTo Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport (AZO), Kalamazoo, MI
- 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 · climb to 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 starvation
- 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 › Starvation
- Pilot in command › Preflight planning/preparation, 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 rental airplane impacted terrain during a forced landing on a wet hay field after the airplane experienced a total loss of engine power during climb from the departure airport. The pilot stated that he preflighted the airplane in moderate rain while his family boarded the airplane, and the baggage was loaded. Instrument meteorological conditions prevailed with ceilings of approximately 500 feet above ground level at the time of the accident. Following the loss of engine power, the pilot reportedly switched fuel tanks and changed mixture settings from rich to lean but was unable to restart the engine. He initated a turn back to the departure airport due to his concern of wooded terrain in the area he was flying over. When he broke out of the cloud base, he had about "20 seconds" to land the airplane on a field that he selected. He stated that his vision was "greatly" obscured by rain and fog and that trees at the end of the field appeared closer that he originally anticipated. The pilot then changed his landing field to an adjacent field where he landed and impacted terrain. The pilot stated that there would have been "little likelihood" of the airplane receiving any damage if he had not switched fields. Inspection of the airplane revealed that the left main fuel tank contained unusable fuel, and the left main fuel tank "quick drain" was open. The airplane's Pilot's Operating Handbook Emergency Procedures states: "If engine failure was caused by fuel exhaustion, power will not be regained after tanks are switched until empty fuel lines are filled, which may be up to ten seconds."
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight of the aircraft by his failure to detect an open fuel drain which resulted in fuel starvation and the loss of engine power. Contributing factors were the pilot's failure to follow emergency procedures, low ceiling, fog and rain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI05CA087
- Event ID
- 20050428X00525
- Case number
- CHI05CA087
- 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: c10e3710e74b58d26f53440ec95d501e6ac0e4703e698bd5f7d179ce06eb912b; retrieved 2026-09-22T06:08:15.530Z.