WPR11LA451 · Peter A Land White Lightning
Peter A Land White Lightning · Accident: fuel starvation on approach
From Rosamond Skypark Airport (L00) to General William J Fox Airfield (WJF)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR11LA451
- 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
Peter A Land White Lightning
- Aircraft type
- Peter A Land WHITE LIGHTNING
- 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
- N2WL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Rosamond Skypark Airport (L00), Rosamond, CATo General William J Fox Airfield (WJF), Lancaster, CA
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern base
- 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 › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was repositioning the experimental airplane for a conditional inspection when, on final approach to land, the engine lost all power. He subsequently performed a forced gear-up landing onto a road adjacent to the destination airport and the airplane sustained substantial damage.
The airplane was equipped with two fuel tanks within each wing. Because fuel leaked from each of the tanks after the accident, an exact determination of fuel quantity could not be confirmed. A fuel selector valve was located on the forward mounting channel below the pilot's seat and out of the pilot’s direct view. Subsequent examination revealed that both tanks contained only residual quantities of fuel and that the supply lines from the fuel selector to the fuel pump and engine were empty, indicative of fuel starvation. One of the fuel tank gauges erroneously indicated a tank quantity of just under 1/4 full when no fuel was actually present in the tank. No mechanical anomalies were noted to the engine that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power during the landing approach due to fuel starvation. Contributing to the accident was the airplane’s inaccurate fuel indicator.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR11LA451
- Event ID
- 20110915X14227
- Case number
- WPR11LA451
- 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: 3cd4924a3b11e3636d58a284eb995c2ee88c9aaec178a9aebe9844d35f8625ac; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:44:29.167Z.