ERA13CA427 · Cessna 182E
Cessna 182E · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Allenholm Airport (VT26) to Floyd Bennett Memorial Airport (GFL)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA13CA427
- 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 182E
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N3152Y
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Allenholm Airport (VT26), SOUTH HERO, VTTo Floyd Bennett Memorial Airport (GFL), Glens Falls, NY
- Aircraft age
- About 51 years (built 1962)
- 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
- 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 as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane departed from a private airport that did not have fuel available for purchase. The pilot reported that he elected to refuel while en route to his destination instead of other airports located near the departure airport. The pilot further reported that upon reaching the airport that he intended to refuel at, he found it was closed and diverted to another airport. At that time, he noticed that the airplane's fuel gauge needles were "bouncing off empty." The airplane subsequently experienced a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion and the pilot performed a forced landing to a field, which resulted in substantial damage to the firewall and forward portion of the fuselage. The pilot stated that he did not experience any mechanical malfunctions with the airplane and had he received a full weather briefing prior to the flight, he would have known about the closed airport and planned accordingly.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight planning, which resulted in a loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA13CA427
- Event ID
- 20130923X91125
- Case number
- ERA13CA427
- 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: a304c67f5de1df65cebfad3454bbdb55d5753a0b1ae24f62231821f5b7176ae4; retrieved 2026-09-15T22:54:01.650Z.