ERA11LA473 · Woolston Glenn E ZENITH 701 STOL
Woolston Glenn E ZENITH 701 STOL · Accident: fuel starvation while maneuvering
From Gaines Valley Aviation Airport (NY06) to Gaines Valley Aviation Airport (NY06)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA11LA473
- 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
Woolston Glenn E ZENITH 701 STOL
- Aircraft type
- Woolston Glenn ZENITH 701
- 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
- N246CV
- Operator
- Woolston Glenn e
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gaines Valley Aviation Airport (NY06), Albion, NYTo Gaines Valley Aviation Airport (NY06), Albion, NY
- 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 starvation
- 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 › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Several days before the accident flight, the pilot performed a local flight in the accident airplane, and, at the beginning of the flight, each fuel tank contained about 8 gallons of fuel. At the initiation of the accident flight, the pilot performed a preflight inspection and noted that the left tank still had 8 gallons of fuel but that the right tank had only 2 gallons. He departed with the fuel selector positioned to the both position, and, about 15 minutes into the flight, the engine sputtered then lost power completely. The pilot maneuvered the airplane for a forced landing in a field. After touchdown with obstructions ahead, he applied the brakes, and the airplane nosed over. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed a blockage of the left fuel tank supply line resulting in no fuel flow to the engine. No other discrepancies were reported. The evidence is consistent with the pilot having exhausted all usable fuel in the right fuel tank, and, due to the fuel line blockage in the left fuel tank supply line, the engine did not receive any fuel from the left tank.
Probable cause
The pilot’s lack of recognition that the engine was being supplied fuel from only the right tank with the fuel selector in the both position, which resulted in the total loss of engine power due to fuel starvation. Contributing to the accident was the blockage of the left fuel tank supply line.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA11LA473
- Event ID
- 20110826X90829
- Case number
- ERA11LA473
- 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: 146ac81925fb5929a28af7c10049587001112504b332d3354c008fbe53342b7b; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:39:58.083Z.