ERA10LA031 · Piper PA28 180
Piper PA28 180 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Hidden Lake Airport (FA40) to Zephyrhills Municipal Airport (ZPH)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA10LA031
- 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 PA28 180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA28
- 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
- N7220W
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Hidden Lake Airport (FA40), New Port Richey East, FLTo Zephyrhills Municipal Airport (ZPH), Zephyrhills, FL
- 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 airplane was 10 minutes into the flight and had just reached a cruise altitude of 2,800 feet above mean sea level when the engine lost power. After unsuccessfully attempting to restart the engine, the pilot attempted a forced landing at an airport off to his left. Approaching the airport, the airplane’s right wing hit a tree and the airplane impacted the ground 400 yards short of the runway. The airplane sustained damage to the wing, fuselage, and propeller. The responding Federal Aviation Administration inspector observed 1/4 gallon of fuel in the right wing fuel tank and no fuel in the left wing tank. There was no evidence of fuel leakage in flight or at the accident site. The wreckage recovery crew reported that they were able to drain 3 quarts of fuel from the airplane. A postaccident engine run was conducted with the engine producing power at high and low rpm settings.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion as a result of the pilot’s inadequate preflight fuel planning.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA10LA031
- Event ID
- 20091026X23653
- Case number
- ERA10LA031
- 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: 4c667d337309272b7045e04c3e315fece0ee3a0657a253abfe524db04789517d; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:26:30.022Z.