CEN10LA054 · Piper PA-28-181
L and P of Winona Piper PA-28-181 · Accident: fuel exhaustion on approach
From Carl Folsom Airport (14J) to Addison Airport (ADS)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN10LA054
- 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-28-181
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N3148Q
- Operator
- L and P of Winona
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Carl Folsom Airport (14J), Carl Folsom, ALTo Addison Airport (ADS), Addison, TX
- 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
- Approach
- 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
During the first leg of a night cross-country flight the pilot stopped (about 441 nautical miles from his departure airport) and filled the airplane with 46.27 gallons of fuel (fuel capacity, 48 gallons usable). The pilot then proceeded to his destination airport. While en route the pilot told air traffic control that he was "cutting this a little short" and needed to divert to a nearby airport (located about 485 nm from his previous refueling stop). During the descent to the airport, the pilot was unable to activate the landing lights at the airport (published out-of-service), so he changed his intended landing airport to another airport, located about 4 miles north. During the approach to that airport, the airplane collided with trees and impacted terrain just short of the runway. An on-site examination of the airplane revealed only a few ounces of fuel was in the left and right wing fuel tanks, and the engine gasolator was empty. A follow-up inspection of the airplane's engine and propeller indicated that the engine was not rotating at the time of impact with the terrain. The engine and airframe examination found no apparent abnormalities that would have prevented normal operation.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion and the pilot's inadequate preflight planning.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN10LA054
- Event ID
- 20091117X31541
- Case number
- CEN10LA054
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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: 4e519009848d384f6ad10b930b90f1b6d30644bbef809f7a0b54025e4b9be9a3; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:29:51.977Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: destination. The city field holds a misspelled airport name; ADS is Addison Airport, serving Addison, TX.