CEN10CA550 · Piper PA-28-140
Piper PA-28-140 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Destin Executive Airport (KDTS) to Addison Airport (KADS)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN10CA550
- 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-28-140
- 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
- N333NA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Destin Executive Airport (KDTS), Destin, FLTo Addison Airport (KADS), 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
- 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
According to the pilot, he departed with about 47 gallons of fuel onboard for a 551-nautical mile cross-country flight. About 3 hours and 15 minutes into the flight, the pilot became concerned with the rate of fuel consumption. The pilot stated that he elected to change his destination to obtain fuel and shortly thereafter the left fuel tank was empty. The pilot then switched back to the right fuel tank and looked for a place to conduct an emergency landing. During the approach for a forced landing the engine changed from idle to full power for 10 to 15 seconds before experiencing a complete loss of power. The airplane’s nose dropped and impacted the roof of an unoccupied barn near vertically. During recovery of the airplane, no fuel was found on site or in the airplane’s fuel tanks.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power during cruise flight due to fuel exhaustion as a result of the pilot’s improper fuel planning.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN10CA550
- Event ID
- 20100921X33423
- Case number
- CEN10CA550
- 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 2010-09-20.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d28103a960e7ff338d276cca89bde98b7fefca283c7e4e5634f8369afbcfa0f3; retrieved 2026-09-15T15:17:59.602Z.