CHI08LA215 · Piper PA-12
Paramount Air Service Piper PA-12 · Accident: fuel exhaustion while maneuvering
From an unrecorded airport to Lakewood Airport (N12)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI08LA215
- 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-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
- N4361M
- Operator
- Paramount Air Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Lakewood Airport (N12), Lakewood, NJ
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
About four hours into the banner-towing flight the engine started to sputter and lost lower. The pilot reported that his inflight fuel burn calculations were based on fuel burn data gathered during the previous month. Using these data, the pilot thought he had about 15-20 minutes of fuel remaining when the engine lost power. The pilot made a forced landing near a residential area and the airplane struck a fence, resulting in substantial damage. A Federal Aviation inspector looked at the fuel tanks at the accident site and found they were empty. The pilot stated that "in order to reduce my total flight time and land with required fuel minimums, I should have turned inland at an earlier point."
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion as a result of the pilot's inadequate fuel management.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI08LA215
- Event ID
- 20081004X12059
- Case number
- CHI08LA215
- 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: cd87c925f9de10179b9e3eee139a8eab448b5ba2ae9b578d01691c5e7ac7d724; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:24:11.286Z.