WPR10LA412 · Cessna 177A
Skylarks Flying Club Cessna 177A · Accident: fuel exhaustion while maneuvering
From KS93 · Cle Elum, WA to Lake Chelan Airport (KS10)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR10LA412
- 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
Cessna 177A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 177
- 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
- N30559
- Operator
- Skylarks Flying Club
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From KS93 · Cle Elum, WATo Lake Chelan Airport (KS10), Chelan, WA
- 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
- Maneuvering · low-altitude flying
- 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 was making a round-robin cross-country flight, and his preflight fuel planning indicated that he would need 15.8 gallons of fuel to complete the flight and have the required reserve for visual flight rules. He visually checked the fuel level in the tanks prior to departure on the first leg and estimated that he had over 30 gallons on board. This approximated what he observed on the fuel gauges at the start of the flight; he did not have a calibrated measuring device for his airplane. The pilot completed the outbound leg successfully. Preflight for the return leg consisted of a walk-around visual inspection of the airplane but did not include a visual examination of the fuel levels in the fuel tanks. Approaching the destination on the return leg, the engine began to run rough, lost all power, restarted briefly, and then lost all power again. The pilot made an off-airport forced landing in rough terrain. Postaccident examination found that the fuel tanks were empty. The pilot surmised that a fuel leak developed for undetermined reasons; however, there was no evidence found to indicate that a fuel leak had occurred.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion, and the pilot’s failure to ensure that a sufficient quantity of fuel was on board to complete the flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR10LA412
- Event ID
- 20100818X92326
- Case number
- WPR10LA412
- 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 2010-08-19.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 641929bd3d458ebb75028e1f4e7119936372cc11718fb990988185198bb8e2b7; retrieved 2026-09-15T14:52:26.156Z.