ERA13LA094 · Wragg George SKYBOLT
Wragg George SKYBOLT · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Venice Municipal Airport (VNC) to Venice Municipal Airport (VNC)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA13LA094
- 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
Wragg George SKYBOLT
- Aircraft type
- Wragg George SKYBOLT
- 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
- N328GW
- Operator
- Schurgers Frank
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Venice Municipal Airport (VNC), Venice, FLTo Venice Municipal Airport (VNC), Venice, FL
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
About 1 month before the accident flight, the pilot added about 17 gallons of fuel to the airplane's bottom fuel tank. About 25 minutes into the accident flight, the engine experienced a total loss of engine power. The pilot ditched the airplane in the Gulf of Mexico, and it sank. A postaccident examination of the wreckage after recovery revealed no mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. The examination also revealed that the fuel tank contained 4 gallons of seawater and no fuel and that the fuel system had only trace amounts of fuel at the gascolator. According to the pilot and local authorities, no evidence of fuel leakage was found in the water. According to fuel records and the pilot's statement, it is likely that the airplane had a total of about 23 gallons of fuel on board at the last refueling; however, 6 gallons of the fuel were in the top tank and used during taxi and run-up operations. Therefore, considering the airplane's lowest fuel consumption rate of about 7.2 gallons per hour, the airplane would have been able to operate for 3.2 total hours. At the time of the accident, it had flown a total of 3.3 flight hours. Therefore, the pilot began the flight with an insufficient amount of fuel and did not monitor its quantity during the flight.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight planning and failure to monitor the fuel quantity during flight, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA13LA094
- Event ID
- 20121219X51952
- Case number
- ERA13LA094
- 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, coordinates. 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: 0fba1af2bf32d5d46474676537ec4891c67e3fcd4b31a78d8b92ebeb829ba239; retrieved 2026-09-15T20:39:03.438Z.