NYC08LA270 · Piper PA-12
Piper PA-12 · Accident: fuel starvation during initial climb
From Moontown Airport (3M5) to Moontown Airport (3M5)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC08LA270
- 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
- 2 · 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-12
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-12
- 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
- N7820H
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Moontown Airport (3M5), Brownsboro, ALTo Moontown Airport (3M5)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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 starvation
- 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 › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot taxied the airplane to the runway and took off. According to witnesses when the airplane was approximately 50 feet above ground level, the engine of the airplane "faltered." The airplane then descended behind a row of trees, the sound of a crash was heard, and smoke began to rise from the area where the plane was last seen. The airplane owner stated to a Safety Board investigator that it was his practice to shut the fuel selector valve off after shutting the engine down, in order to prevent fuel from draining from the wing tanks, through the carburetor, and on to the ground. He further stated that with the fuel selector valve in the "OFF" position, enough fuel remained in the lines and gascolator to permit a taxi out, engine runup, and a few more minutes of engine operation. The fuel selector valve from the accident airplane was recovered and confirmed to be in the "OFF" position.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to ensure the fuel valve was on prior taxi and takeoff. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s failure to maintain airspeed following loss of engine power due to fuel starvation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC08LA270
- Event ID
- 20080812X01222
- Case number
- NYC08LA270
- 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. 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: 406f128e2bf5c6cd0b4f8721d34c07cc43757184459441631e4f3c53be1e2142; retrieved 2026-09-13T19:20:08.564Z.