WPR10CA267 · Piper PA-28-181
Piper PA-28-181 · Accident: fuel starvation on approach
From Redding Municipal Airport (KRDD) to Palo Alto Airport (KPAO)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR10CA267
- 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
- N2865M
- Operator
- Williams Evan H
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Redding Municipal Airport (KRDD), Redding, CATo Palo Alto Airport (KPAO), Palo Alto, CA
- 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 · VFR pattern final
- 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 pilot stated that prior to departing on a cross-country flight the "airplane was topped [off with fuel] prior to the flight." Before the return trip the pilot visually checked the fuel level in the tanks and estimated that the right tank had 10 gallons and the left had 12 gallons of fuel. The pilot reported that while on final approach to the destination airport the "engine began to sputter" and lost power. He attempted to perform an engine restart, including switching the fuel selector to another tank, but was unsuccessful. The airplane subsequently impacted terrain short of the runway resulting in substantial damage to the right wing and firewall. In a verbal statement the pilot said that he "suspected a fuel management issue." An FAA inspector examined the airplane and found that the right fuel tank was empty and the left tank had approximately 3.5 gallons of fuel. According to the FAA inspector the fuel tanks were still intact and there was no evidence of a fuel leak.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power on final approach 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 WPR10CA267
- Event ID
- 20100529X35051
- Case number
- WPR10CA267
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2010-05-29.
- API snapshot SHA-256: fa5d4843bd0913ee444c05b1d82b7d92b11886bdd2a6cbc5fb3a2a5dc3db4631; retrieved 2026-09-15T14:16:04.409Z.