ERA13LA117 · Cirrus Design Corp SR20
Epic Blue Cirrus Design Corp SR20 · Accident: fuel exhaustion on approach
From Groton New London Airport (GON) to Danbury Municipal Airport (DXR)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA13LA117
- 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
Cirrus Design Corp SR20
- Aircraft type
- Cirrus SR20
- 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
- N140PG
- Operator
- Epic Blue
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Groton New London Airport (GON), Groton, CTTo Danbury Municipal Airport (DXR), Danbury, CT
- Aircraft age
- About 5 years (built 2008)
- 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
- Approach
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor was conducting a two-leg, cross-country familiarization flight at night with a private pilot. The flight instructor reported that, before departure, he used a flashlight to look in the airplane's fuel tanks and determined that they contained 25 gallons of usable fuel and that the two flight legs would require 23.3 gallons of fuel. He then entered 22 gallons in the airplane's multifunction display (MFD) fuel totalizer. The airplane reached its destination airport and departed on the return flight without incident; however, shortly after takeoff, the low fuel caution light illuminated. The airplane subsequently experienced a total loss of engine power. The flight instructor deployed the airplane's parachute system, and the airplane subsequently descended into trees about 3 miles northeast of the airport. Postaccident examination of the airplane did not reveal any mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation, and less than 1 gallon of fuel was drained from the fuel tanks.
The president of the flight school stated that, 2 days before the accident, he had 42 gallons of fuel added to the fuel tanks. He then entered 40 gallons in the airplane's MFD fuel totalizer. He flew two more flights and estimated that the fuel totalizer should have indicated between 14 and 16 gallons before the first leg of the accident flight. Recorded MFD data showed that the total amount of fuel used since the last refueling was 42.4 gallons. The flight instructor likely overestimated the amount of fuel in the airplane before departure and entered the wrong amount into the MFD fuel totalizer, which led to an erroneous display of the actual amount of fuel remaining and his belief that the airplane had sufficient fuel for the flight.
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s inadequate preflight inspection in which he incorrectly estimated the airplane’s fuel quantity and his improper reliance on the fuel totalizer rather than the fuel quantity indicating and warning systems to determine the fuel on board, 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 ERA13LA117
- Event ID
- 20130123X73100
- Case number
- ERA13LA117
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2013-01-23.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 9a0bba2b4e13566a56558bca54f462c8f2fc3b64c3fe5e3e6f0ce87a0676f114; retrieved 2026-09-15T20:48:17.682Z.