WPR13LA383 · Piper PA-38
Golden Eagle Enterprises Piper PA-38 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Buchanan Field (CCR) to Fresno Yosemite International Airport (FAT)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR13LA383
- 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-38
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-38
- 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
- N2578L
- Operator
- Golden Eagle Enterprises
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Buchanan Field (CCR), Concord, CATo Fresno Yosemite International Airport (FAT), Fresno, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 34 years (built 1979)
- 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 · descent
- 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
The flight instructor and the pilot receiving instruction planned to originate and terminate the flight at the flight school's home airport with an intermediate stop and a touch-and-go landing at other airports. Both the intermediate stop (at an airport closer than the original planned destination) and the touch-and-go landing were accomplished. On the return leg, when the airplane was about 25 miles from the home airport, the engine stopped developing power, and the instructor conducted a forced landing in a field. Examination of the airplane revealed that the fuel tanks were devoid of fuel and did not reveal any other possible reasons for the complete loss of engine power.
The pilot calculated the total fuel required for the trip to the original destination, and then from the intermediate stop back including reserves but not including unusable fuel. None of the calculations included fuel for the touch-and-go landing or its associated maneuvering, which would have added to the fuel required.
After landing at the intermediate stop, the pilot's observed onboard fuel quantity was less than the pilot's calculations indicated was necessary for a direct return, which did not include the fuel for the touch-and-go landing. Despite that and the fact that fuel was available, no fuel was added.
Just before the power loss, the instructor observed that the fuel quantity gauges indicated that about 10 gallons of fuel remained. Although the instructor had previously noted inaccurate cockpit fuel quantity indications in the airplane, he did not believe that the indicated fuel quantity was inaccurate. Had either the instructor or the pilot compared the indicated fuel remaining values with the planned values, they would have detected a discrepancy, which, in turn, should have prompted them to land at an airport short of the home airport to take on additional fuel.
Probable cause
The pilots' inadequate fuel planning, which resulted in the airplane departing with insufficient fuel to complete the planned flight, and their failure to recognize that discrepancy en route, 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 WPR13LA383
- Event ID
- 20130823X02103
- Case number
- WPR13LA383
- 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: 141960d89f0496918b7f2c6443a39b0a7ccd996ee2bccd2261581e0341853b2a; retrieved 2026-09-15T22:35:52.718Z.