ANC12LA080 · Cessna 182B
Cessna 182B · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Northway Airport (PAOR) to Gulkana Airport (PAGK)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC12LA080
- 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 182B
- 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
- N7150E
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Northway Airport (PAOR), Northway, AKTo Gulkana Airport (PAGK), Gulkana, AK
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was ferrying the airplane from Washington to Alaska. About 40 minutes into the sixth leg of the trip, the airplane's engine lost all power, and the pilot made a forced landing to a tree-covered field, sustaining substantial damage to the wings, fuselage, and empennage. A review of the pilot's fueling receipts, along with the flight times on each of the legs, revealed that the engine was consuming an average of 14.6 gallons per hour (gph) of fuel during the first four legs of the trip. On the next leg, the fuel consumption rose to an average of 17.13 gph.
The airplane had flown a total time of 3:10:48, from the time the pilot last refueled. According to the airplane manufacturers cruise and range performance charts, if flown in accordance with the notes on the chart, the airplane should have had enough fuel to fly between four and five hours. However, if the most recent calculated actual fuel burn of 17.13 gph was used, the airplanes fuel endurance would have been about 3 hours 12 minutes.
Given the pilot's statement that he did not lean the fuel mixture during the leg before the accident leg, the calculated fuel consumption on that leg, and the absence of fuel found in the fuel tanks postaccident, it is likely that the engine was using considerably more fuel than the pilot had calculated by the performance charts. The investigation was unable to determine if the unattached fuel bladder fasteners would have an effect on fuel quantity. Also, given the lack of anomaly during the test engine run, it is likely that the engine lost power due to fuel exhaustion.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper fuel planning, 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 ANC12LA080
- Event ID
- 20120731X92703
- Case number
- ANC12LA080
- 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: 05d4e2bdfedd96e5dd56839424d2ac226dded4b5e32b98de8f369c101a635122; retrieved 2026-09-15T19:08:52.760Z.