ERA11LA292 · Flight Design Gmbh CTLS
Mint Air Flight Design Gmbh CTLS · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From St Simons Island Airport (SSI) to Greenville Downtown Airport (GMU)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA11LA292
- 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
Flight Design Gmbh CTLS
- Aircraft type
- Flight Design CTLS
- 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
- N78BZ
- Operator
- Mint Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From St Simons Island Airport (SSI), Brunswick, GATo Greenville Downtown Airport (GMU), Greenville, SC
- 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 flight instructor and the pilot-rated passenger reported that they began the cross-country flight with about 15 gallons of fuel, which was enough to fly for 3 hours. About 1 hour after departure, the airplane was in cruise flight when the pilots received a low fuel pressure warning on the airplane's multifunction display. Shortly after, the airplane's engine began to sputter. The instructor maneuvered the airplane toward a road to execute a forced landing, and the engine experienced a total loss of power. During landing, the airplane's right wing impacted a telephone pole guy wire. The right wing separated from the airframe, and the airplane came to rest upright in a ditch. At the accident site, examination of the airplane's right wing fuel tank revealed a “sheen” of fuel, and the left wing fuel tank was found to be dry. About one cup of fuel was drained from the gascolator, and the carburetor float bowls were absent of fuel. Both a visual inspection and a successful test run of the engine after the accident revealed no evidence of any preaccident mechanical malfunctions or anomalies. Examination of the airplane revealed no evidence of fuel leakage from the wings or the engine compartment. It is likely that the pilots overestimated the amount of fuel aboard the airplane, which resulted in fuel exhaustion.
Probable cause
The pilots’ failure to ensure that the airplane had enough fuel to complete the planned flight, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA11LA292
- Event ID
- 20110510X55153
- Case number
- ERA11LA292
- 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: f9fcc39cde576798f9f0b17bf7c87b79b07876200ad894364e40df6439e87372; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:09:11.713Z.