ERA11LA457 · Piper Aircraft Inc PA-32R-301T
Piper Aircraft Inc PA-32R-301T · Accident: fuel exhaustion while maneuvering
From IGX · Chapel Hill, NC to Unalakleet Airport (UNK)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA11LA457
- 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 Aircraft Inc PA-32R-301T
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N492ST
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From IGX · Chapel Hill, NCTo Unalakleet Airport (UNK), Unknown
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was stolen during nighttime hours and flown at varying airspeeds and altitudes for about 2 hours before it impacted trees and terrain. Photographs of the accident scene revealed damage indicative of an almost vertical descent and consistent with a stall. There was no indication of engine power at the time of impact, and no significant amount of fuel was found at the scene, in the airplane, or seeped into the ground. An individual, who had previously held a student pilot certificate, was arrested 2 days after the event. The individual refused to provide a statement to authorities. Fuel prior to takeoff and power settings used could not be determined; however, with fuel exhaustion occurring after only 2 hours for an airplane that should have had considerably more endurance if fully fueled and operated correctly, it is likely that the individual mismanaged the rate of fuel consumption.
Probable cause
The individual's fuel mismanagement, which resulted in fuel exhaustion and a subsequent engine failure. Contributing the accident was the individual’s failure to maintain adequate airspeed following the engine failure, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA11LA457
- Event ID
- 20110816X65155
- Case number
- ERA11LA457
- 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: d35a50b5307ed938150442fc7ee2d9a5ec7303de515bbfe8e92cfecc69c9c5b5; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:37:17.046Z.