WPR11LA266 · Cessna 172P
Cessna 172P · Accident: fuel exhaustion while maneuvering
From 43U · Mount Pleasant, UT to 43U · Mount Pleasant, UT
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's injuries. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR11LA266
- 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 172P
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N65654
- Operator
- Davis Brian W
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 43U · Mount Pleasant, UTTo 43U · Mount Pleasant, UT
- 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
- 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
On the day of the accident, the pilot reported that he expected the borrowed airplane’s fuel tanks to be full. Since there was no ladder available to visually view the fuel tank quantity or to use a dip stick, he relied on the fuel gauges, which indicated that the left tank was about 3/8 full and the right fuel gauge indicated full. After accomplishing two parachute drops, an individual asked the pilot to take him and his children on a local sightseeing flight. During that flight, the engine lost power and the pilot subsequently made a forced landing to a field. During the wreckage recovery, personnel reported that neither fuel tank was breached and that the tanks were empty, suggesting that the loss of engine power was due to fuel exhaustion. Throughout the day, the airplane’s fuel quantity gauges gave indications that suggested the tanks contained fuel, and the pilot, therefore, continued to fly the airplane without visually inspecting the quantity of fuel in the tanks. Postaccident examination and testing of the fuel quantity indicating system did not reveal any mechanical malfunctions or failures that would preclude normal operation. The pilot who previously flew the airplane reported that, although the protocol was that all individuals who borrowed the airplane were to fill its fuel tanks after using it, he had failed to do so and left about 5 gallons of fuel in one tank and about 3 gallons of fuel in the other.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to determine the airplane’s fuel quantity before takeoff, which resulted in a loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR11LA266
- Event ID
- 20110618X94045
- Case number
- WPR11LA266
- 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: 7b66c8e5281416e605ea59314892e82774d4d8a89470f1d093c6af904eacff15; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:18:33.714Z.