CHI05CA142 · Piper PA-28-181
Kansas City Aviation Center Piper PA-28-181 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Pinckneyville Du Quoin Airport (PJY) to Johnson County Executive Airport (OJC)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI05CA142
- 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-28-181
- 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
- N6294C
- Operator
- Kansas City Aviation Center
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Pinckneyville Du Quoin Airport (PJY), Pinckneyville, ILTo Johnson County Executive Airport (OJC), Olathe, KS
- 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
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › Aircraft preflight, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane sustained substantial damage during a forced landing after a loss of engine power. The pilot reported that the projected flight time was "expected to be 2 hours and 36 minutes, and the fuel on board was planned at 5 hours 30 minutes, with a 2 hour reserve." When he was about 25 nm from his destination airport, he started his descent from 4,500 feet mean sea level (msl) to 2,000 feet msl. He reported that he checked the fuel gauges and they indicated that the fuel was "well over half full." When he was about 12 nm from the airport, the engine lost power over a populated area. He executed a forced landing to an area that did not have lights. The airplane landed upright in a muddy field after skidding about 200-300 feet. About one cup of fuel was drained from each wing tank sump and about a spoonful of fuel from the gascolator during the examination of the airplane. There was no evidence of a fuel leak anywhere on the airplane. The engine was rotated and thumb compression was observed on all cylinders, and spark was observed on all spark plugs. The pilot rented the airplane from a fixed base operator on June 10, 2005. The airplane was dispatched with the fuel tanks topped off with 48 gallons of fuel. The pilot reported that he flew nonstop to an airport located 246 nautical miles away. The pilot reported that on June 14, 2005, he flew to an airport that was 23 nautical miles away where he purchased 20.0 gallons of fuel. The pilot then flew back to the same airport 23 nautical miles away before departing on the accident flight later that night. The tachometer indicated the airplane had operated 6.2 hours, and the Hobbs meter indicated the airplane had flown 6.0 hours since the airplane was dispatched to the pilot on June 10th. The Pilot's Operating Handbook (POH) indicated that the average fuel burn at 75 percent power with the engine properly leaned was about 10.5 gallons per hour. The average fuel burn for the accident airplane during the 6.0 hours (Hobbs time) it had been rented to the pilot was about 11.3 gallons per hour.
Probable cause
The loss of total engine power due to fuel exhaustion as a result of the pilot's inadequate preflight. A factor was the unsuitable terrain encountered during the forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI05CA142
- Event ID
- 20050712X00996
- Case number
- CHI05CA142
- 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: bd821ae8f390c8b896003e1e4a4a5e1cda7b92537b78a2f858ca6fe9280b8f5a; retrieved 2026-09-22T05:47:27.876Z.