LAX07CA111 · Cessna 182
Cessna 182 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Crater Lake-Klamath Regional Airport (KLMT) to Eugene Airport (KEUG)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX07CA111
- 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 182
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N6462A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Crater Lake-Klamath Regional Airport (KLMT), Klamath Falls, ORTo Eugene Airport (KEUG), Eugene, OR
- 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 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
- Pilot in command › Fuel supply, not verified
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While en route on a night cross-county flight, the engine quit due to fuel exhaustion and the pilot made a forced landing on a mountain slope. The pilot received a phone call earlier that his sister had been admitted to the hospital with a medical condition. The pilot decided that he would fly that night to the city where his sister was hospitalized. The pilot performed a preflight inspection but failed to fuel the airplane. He took off at 2100. Shortly after reaching his cruising altitude of 12,500 feet he realized that he had not fueled the airplane. Upon checking the fuel gauges determined that the fuel tanks were empty. He radioed the tower at his destination airport that he was out of fuel and anticipated a forced landing in the mountains. The engine then quit and he turned the airplane to the southeast to try to land on a small Forest Service mountain runway. He could see the ground and mountainous terrain getting closer, determined that he would not make it to the runway, and proceeded to force land the airplane on a steep snow covered slope.
Probable cause
Fuel exhaustion due to the pilot's inadequate preflight inspection and failure to verify the fuel supply. A factor was the night lighting condition.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX07CA111
- Event ID
- 20070403X00359
- Case number
- LAX07CA111
- 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 2007-03-17.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 168ca4c6942538dca0c0f75dd49a547ab98b68310a53d6a78c57bff35d008df7; retrieved 2026-09-21T08:50:23.584Z.