ERA11CA364 · Helio H-295
Helio H-295 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Macon County Airport (1A5) to Brasstown, NC
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA11CA364
- 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
Helio H-295
- Aircraft type
- Helio H-295
- 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
- N99PM
- Operator
- Gary Schmitt
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Macon County Airport (1A5), Franklin, NCTo Brasstown, NC
- 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 · descent
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While the flight was descending for landing, the airplane's engine lost power. The pilot was able restore engine power for a few seconds, but the engine then sputtered and lost power again. The pilot was unable to restart the engine, so he set up a glide for the airstrip he was descending to. There was a headwind and, when he realized he could not make the airstrip, the pilot performed a forced landing in a field. The airplane's landing gear struck the top of a tree and the airplane pitched down and impacted the ground, where it sustained substantial damage to the fuselage and tail. A postaccident examination of the airplane and engine revealed that all of the fuel tanks were devoid of fuel and only three drops of fuel were discovered in the carburetor and fuel supply line. The pilot stated that there was no evidence of any preimpact mechanical malfunction of the airplane or engine.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight planning, 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 ERA11CA364
- Event ID
- 20110627X55232
- Case number
- ERA11CA364
- 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, coordinates. 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: d475e24fa3b6ec7d5d01297729081db526b6f261ee788c51d74ce2deb03ea629; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:21:38.237Z.