WPR11LA452 · Cessna 182H
Cessna 182H · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Roosevelt Municipal Airport (74V) to DXZ · St. George, UT
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's departure or destination. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR11LA452
- 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 182H
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N1843X
- Operator
- Bromley, Don Curtis · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route Possible conflict
- From Roosevelt Municipal Airport (74V), Roosevelt, UTTo DXZ · St. George, 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
- En route · cruise
- 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 in cruise flight when its engine lost power. The pilot performed a forced landing to a road, but, during the landing roll, he noticed a vehicle coming toward him. He turned the airplane to the right, off the road, through a fence, and into an adjacent field. A local law enforcement officer examined the airplane immediately after the accident and found both fuel tanks empty. He also noted that the left fuel tank’s cap was missing. Three days after the accident, the pilot found the fuel cap in the run-up area at the departure airport. The pilot stated that he had filled both fuel tanks before beginning the flight and that he either did not replace the fuel cap or left it loose following the refueling. Without the fuel cap in place, airflow over the wing suctioned fuel out of the left wing tank during flight. Because of the interconnection between the two wing fuel tanks, fuel from the right wing tank flowed into the left tank and was also lost overboard, resulting in fuel exhaustion.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to secure the left tank's fuel cap after refueling the airplane, 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 WPR11LA452
- Event ID
- 20110916X40812
- Case number
- WPR11LA452
- 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: 83ca768f9c1cfea9730ddb3c4df05096860852bf9b8856eb3f0fce2f53e4f4b1; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:44:41.615Z.