ERA12LA482 · Piper PA-12
Paramount Air Service Piper PA-12 · Accident: fuel starvation while maneuvering
From Paramount Airport (JY04) to Paramount Airport (JY04)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12LA482
- 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 PA-12
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-12
- 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
- N4361M
- Operator
- Paramount Air Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Paramount Airport (JY04), Green Creek, NJTo Paramount Airport (JY04), Green Creek, NJ
- 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 › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was returning to land after an uneventful banner-towing flight. He dropped the banner, added full engine power, climbed to traffic pattern altitude, and maneuvered to enter the downwind leg of the traffic pattern. During the climb, the engine sputtered and then lost total power. The pilot was not able to restart the engine and performed a forced landing into trees. Postaccident examination of the airplane did not reveal any mechanical malfunctions that would have precluded normal operation. Both fuel tanks were intact; the right fuel tank was found empty and the left fuel tank contained about 1.75 gallons of fuel. The airplane had been operated for more than 4 1/2 hours since its last refueling. It is likely that the airplane's low fuel state, combined with the maneuvering associated with the banner drop and the airplane’s subsequent pitch-up and airport traffic pattern operations resulted in an interruption of fuel flow to the engine.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate fuel planning, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel starvation while maneuvering.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12LA482
- Event ID
- 20120726X72700
- Case number
- ERA12LA482
- 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: 8aa0dc12b168c01196c6d815b58b1e840dcb5c2e2ccfc2c26fac51becda9ed83; retrieved 2026-09-15T19:05:34.458Z.