WPR12CA400 · Piper PA-32-300
Piper PA-32-300 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From General William J Fox Airfield (WJF) to Agua Dulce Airpark (L70)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR12CA400
- 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-32-300
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N308DF
- Operator
- Cangiano Lorene D
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From General William J Fox Airfield (WJF), Lancaster, CATo Agua Dulce Airpark (L70), Agua Dulce, 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
- En route · climb to 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
- Loss of engine power (total)
- 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
The student pilot was flying solo back to her home airport after completing a lesson with a flight instructor. Before the flight instructor exited the airplane, the student pilot verified that the right main fuel tank was selected and full. However, as the airplane climbed through about 700 feet above ground level, the engine began to sputter. The student pilot checked the ignition switch and turned on the boost pump. She elected to land straight ahead in an empty field rather than try to turn back to the runway and made a soft field, power-off landing. During the landing roll, the right main landing gear began to sink into a furrow. The airplane’s nose gear collapsed, resulting in damage to the firewall. The student stated that the fuel selector valve had been problematic due to the lightness of the stop between the right main and the right wing tip positions. On previous occasions, she had noticed that it could be inadvertently moved from the right main to the tip, and had developed a method of planting her hand before selecting the right main so as to prevent the selector from moving through the stop to the right tip. After the accident, she verified that the fuel selector was in the right tip tank position, and that tank was empty.
Probable cause
The student pilot’s inadvertent selection of an empty fuel tank.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR12CA400
- Event ID
- 20120906X42322
- Case number
- WPR12CA400
- 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: 96dbc66a3860f690e958305154d768ed2416e2b31bbc59ccf6b050079bbc1ecd; retrieved 2026-09-15T19:44:02.968Z.