WPR13LA272 · Cessna 175
Cessna 175 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Tehachapi Municipal Airport (TSP) to Prescott Regional Airport - Ernest A. Love Field (PRC)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's injuries. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR13LA272
- 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 175
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 175
- 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
- N9370B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tehachapi Municipal Airport (TSP), Tehachapi, CATo Prescott Regional Airport - Ernest A. Love Field (PRC), Prescott, AZ
- 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
- 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 › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot was conducting a personal cross-country flight with three passengers on board. The pilot reported that, during cruise flight, the engine began to "sputter" and subsequently lost power. As the airplane began to descend, the pilot began to set it up for best glide airspeed to initiate an emergency landing. The airplane subsequently impacted desert terrain short of the intended landing site.
Postaccident examination of the airframe, engine, and fuel system revealed no anomalies that would have precluded normal operation. First responders reported seeing no visible signs of fuel nor smelling fuel around the airplane. Further, wreckage recovery personnel reported that there was no fuel in the fuel system. The pilot did not provide a statement about the airplane's fuel quantity at the time of departure; however, the evidence indicates that fuel exhaustion caused the loss of engine power.
The investigation revealed that, although the airplane was manufactured with four seats, the airplane was only equipped with three seats: the pilot seat, the front passenger seat, and the rear passenger seat. Therefore, there were more passengers than available seats, which led to an adult and a child older than 2 years being seated together in the front passenger seat and sharing the seatbelt. According to federal regulations, an approved safety belt with an approved metal-to-metal latching device is required for each occupant 2 years of age or older; the adult passenger sustained serious injuries, likely because she was sharing the seat with the child. The rear seat, which was occupied by one passenger, was attached to the floor via a "homemade" mounting frame constructed with a welded hollow pipe structure that had mounting points to attach the seat; this structure failed during the impact sequence, which resulted in the passenger sustaining serious injuries. No approval paperwork for the modified seat installation was found during the investigation.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion as a result of the pilot’s inadequate fuel planning. Contributing to the severity of the front passenger’s injuries was the pilot’s decision to depart with more passengers than available seats, which resulted in an adult and a child passenger sharing a seatbelt. Contributing to the severity of the rear passenger’s injuries was the failure of the unapproved modified seat installation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR13LA272
- Event ID
- 20130616X05520
- Case number
- WPR13LA272
- 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 2013-06-16.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 6309fbc00508b0c77a2f90644b835fdde2499e8953596af2e2a063ded05b3cd6; retrieved 2026-09-15T21:53:36.948Z.