ANC09LA007 · Piper PA-32R
Piper PA-32R · Accident: fuel starvation during initial climb
From South Hollywood Airport (67AK) to Merrill Field (PAMR)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC09LA007
- 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-32R
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N1392H
- Operator
- Josh Jacko
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From South Hollywood Airport (67AK), Wasilla, AKTo Merrill Field (PAMR), Anchorage, AK
- 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 › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot began his preflight inspection of his airplane for a local personal flight by rocking the wings, and he heard fuel sloshing in the wing fuel tanks. After starting the engine, the pilot noted that the left fuel gauge was indicating about 10 gallons and the right tank was indicating about 15 gallons. The pilot indicated that he taxied the length of the runway before takeoff and made a 180-degree right turn at the end while adding engine power for the takeoff run. About 100 feet above the ground, the engine began to lose power and the pilot switched to the right fuel tank, but the engine did not restart before the airplane descended into trees and impacted the ground. The pilot said that after the accident he noticed that the left wing fuel tank contained about 3 gallons and the right tank contained about 10 to 15 gallons. A Federal Aviation Administration inspector reported that the pilot thought that he may have starved the engine of fuel since the left tank only had about 3 gallons of fuel in it.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power in flight due to fuel starvation as a result of the pilot's inadequate fuel management.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC09LA007
- Event ID
- 20081027X32808
- Case number
- ANC09LA007
- 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: 0d3da6af9561885310c98843bf84b3e2747b3071270acd2a2a3e7c3288570b13; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:30:33.976Z.