LAX08CA166 · Piper PA-38-112
Piper PA-38-112 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Bullfrog Basin Airport (KU07) to Winslow Lindbergh Regional Airport (KINW)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX08CA166
- 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-38-112
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-38
- 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
- N9276T
- Operator
- Barry W. McDaniel · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bullfrog Basin Airport (KU07), Bull Frog, UTTo Winslow Lindbergh Regional Airport (KINW), Winslow, 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
- 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
- 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 believed he took off with 14 gallons of fuel aboard, and flew toward his destination, 170 miles away. He calculated that the fight should take 1 hour 40 minutes. En route he noticed that fuel was disappearing quickly, and assumed there was a headwind. After 1 hour 40 minutes, the airplane ran out of fuel, 57 statute miles from his destination, and the pilot landed in the desert. At a fuel consumption rate of 5.3 gallons per hour, the total actual fuel aboard at the time of takeoff was most likely 9 gallons.
Probable cause
Fuel exhaustion due to the pilot's inadequate preflight planning and failure to ensure that adequate fuel was onboard to complete the flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX08CA166
- Event ID
- 20080701X00962
- Case number
- LAX08CA166
- 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: 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: 789779dccc57035e727204f97bdc52324a0496908d2f965053743d670c29377c; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:50:51.273Z.