CHI08LA108 · Cessna 172L
Green Castle Aeor Club Cessna 172L · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Waterloo Regional Airport (ALO) to Green Castle Airport (IA24)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's operator. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI08LA108
- 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 172L
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N9832G
- Operator
- Green Castle Aeor Club Narrative disagrees
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Waterloo Regional Airport (ALO), Waterloo, IATo Green Castle Airport (IA24), Oxford, IA
- 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
- Defining eventThe 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
- 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
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed on a 3-leg round-robin flight under night visual meteorological (VMC) conditions. He did not refuel the airplane prior to departure. During the second leg of the flight, the pilot picked up two passengers and flew for about 30 minutes and deplaned them at the same airport. Then the pilot continued on the third flight leg. He was en route at 3,000 feet msl when the engine began to run rough and lost about 50 percent of its power. The pilot reported that the engine quit and he executed a forced landing to a field. The airplane nosed over in the soft soil. The Hobbs meter indicated that the accident flight was 2.9 hours in length. The pilot who flew the accident airplane previously that day reported that he did not top off the fuel prior to the 1.1-hour flight that he flew. He did not add fuel after the flight, which left about 22.3 gallons of useable fuel on board the airplane. The Pilot Operating Handbook (POH) indicated that the airplane used about 9.7 gallons of fuel during the 1.1 hour flight. According to the POH, the airplane used about 7.9 gallons per hour in cruise flight at 2,500 feet msl. An additional 1-gallon of fuel was consumed in the climb to 2,500 feet msl. The estimated fuel consumed during the accident flight was about 23.9 gallons.
Probable cause
Fuel exhaustion as a result of the pilot's inadequate preflight inspection and inaccurate fuel calculations.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI08LA108
- Event ID
- 20080424X00537
- Case number
- CHI08LA108
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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 2008-04-21.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 172edc75872b38ead1dbdfbcd71ec7c7f573486a9b890a7b1eb822d1cfa3a207; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:34:22.832Z.