LAX08CA164 · Cessna 172
Cessna 172 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Van Nuys Airport (KVNY) to Rohnerville Airport (KFOT)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX08CA164
- 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 172
- 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
- N6494E
- Operator
- Barry Sanford
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Van Nuys Airport (KVNY), Van Nuys, CATo Rohnerville Airport (KFOT), Fortuna, CA
- 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 · descent
- 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 took off with 38 gallons of fuel on board, and planned a 3-hour flight to his refueling stop. After departure he followed the wrong highway northeast. He realized his mistake, adjusted his course to intercept the correct highway, and continued on to his destination. He flew at 4,500 feet mean sea level (msl) and 110 miles per hour (mph) ground speed according to his global positioning system (GPS). Winds aloft at 4,950 feet msl were from 320 degrees at 21 knots, providing a strong headwind. After 4.4 hours of flight, the airplane ran out of fuel near his refueling stop, and the pilot made a forced landing into a vineyard near the airport.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper in-flight decision making and inadequate fuel consumption calculations that resulted in fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX08CA164
- Event ID
- 20080710X01013
- Case number
- LAX08CA164
- 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 2008-06-06.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 2de31ecbd9b88d075afa7483a54d8e50d7266ab6dad1935583f09de075af0f56; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:53:13.624Z.