DEN06LA003 · Aeronca 7AC
Aeronca 7AC · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Berthoud, CO to Berthoud, CO
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN06LA003
- 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
Aeronca 7AC
- Aircraft type
- Aeronca 7
- 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
- N84580
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Berthoud, COTo Berthoud, CO
- 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
- Loss of engine power
- 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; Pole
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The Continental C-65 engine had been removed, and the airplane was equipped with a Lycoming O-235-C1 engine, rated at 115 horsepower at 2,600 rpm. According to the pilot, he filled his fuel tanks (13 gallons each wing) and took off. He made four touch-and-go landings at his private airstrip, then flew north "to see the aspens." On the return leg, the engine "sputtered." He enriched the mixture and the engine ran smoothly. Shortly thereafter, the engine sputtered again. The fuel gauges indicated between 1/4 and 1/2 full. He rocked the wings and the engine ran smoothly again. Finally, after flying for 2-1/2 hours, the engine completely lost power. Unable to reach his airstrip, the pilot elected to land on a county road. The airplane struck telephone wires and a steel post alongside the road, tearing off the left wing. The pilot told a sheriff's deputy that he ran out of fuel. According to the salvage crew that retrieved the airplane, they drained 2-1/2 gallons of fuel from the right tank. The pilot said there should have been another 2-1/2 gallons of fuel in the left tank. The engine was later functionally tested to full power.
Probable cause
the pilot's improper in-flight decision making which resulted in loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion. Contributing factors are the transmission wires and the metal pole.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN06LA003
- Event ID
- 20051013X01632
- Case number
- DEN06LA003
- 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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2005-10-09.
- API snapshot SHA-256: c0e229c3f78dbf45e48f869b169c683e08457603de4835e179729b6b80ff201d; retrieved 2026-09-22T05:18:36.539Z.