ERA10CA003 · Malone Henry O Howland H-2A
Malone Henry O Howland H-2A · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Middle Peninsula Regional Airport (FYJ) to Gloucester, VA
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA10CA003
- 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
Malone Henry O Howland H-2A
- Aircraft type
- Malone Henry HOWLAND
- 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
- N6626R
- Operator
- Michael Malone
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Middle Peninsula Regional Airport (FYJ), West Point, VATo Gloucester, VA
- 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
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot stated that he was conducting a short flight to a friend's private airport, approximately 12 nautical miles away from his point of departure. He stated that he visually inspected the airplane's fuel level prior to departure and estimated that he had enough fuel to conduct the flight. The airplane was not equipped with a fuel quantity gauge. The pilot stated that while cruising at 1,500 feet, he "ran out of gas." The pilot attempted to land on a road, but the airplane collided with power lines and then struck the ground. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the wings and fuselage. The pilot stated that there were no mechanical malfunctions or failures of the airplane. A Federal Aviation Administration inspector who responded to the accident scene reported that there was no fuel found in any of the airplane's fuel tanks.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion as a result of the pilot's inadequate pre-flight planning .
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA10CA003
- Event ID
- 20091003X75505
- Case number
- ERA10CA003
- 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: 169b321598e19b1fb1a9167b894efa83dde9c0c015416b8f599356dfd0125154; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:22:36.146Z.