LAX06CA120 · Cessna 177
Cessna 177 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Payson Airport (PAN) to Phoenix Deer Valley Airport (DVT)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX06CA120
- 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 177
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 177
- 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
- N29377
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Payson Airport (PAN), Payson, AZTo Phoenix Deer Valley Airport (DVT), Phoenix, AZ
- 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 › Fuel consumption calculations, inaccurate
- Pilot in command › Refueling, not performed
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 impacted a road sign at night during a forced landing following a loss of engine power in cruise flight. The pilot reported that he ran out of gas and had not refueled the airplane since earlier in the week. Since that refueling the pilot conducted an additional cross-country flight and was flying his second when the accident occurred. He said he had performed some mental calculations prior to departing on the first leg of the accident flight and believed he had enough fuel to conduct both legs of the trip. However, in actuality he did not have enough fuel and the engine lost power about 30 minutes into the second leg of the flight. The pilot diverted to an airport for an emergency landing, but after realizing the airplane would not make it to the airport, he elected to land on a road marked by the tail lights of an automobile. Upon landing, the right wing impacted a road sign and the airplane veered into a ditch and brush. The pilot reported that if he had refueled prior to departing on either leg of the flight, the accident could have been averted.
Probable cause
fuel exhaustion due to the pilot's inaccurate fuel consumption calculations and his failure to refuel the airplane prior to the accident flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX06CA120
- Event ID
- 20060314X00301
- Case number
- LAX06CA120
- 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 2006-02-18.
- API snapshot SHA-256: ce14c9d283ea435820905ba0c9d19099131cde12b85b6079b844d43b302b351d; retrieved 2026-09-22T05:06:14.780Z.