ERA14LA094 · Cessna 150H
Cessna 150H · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Cullman Regional Airport-Folsom Field (KCMD) to L38 · Gonzales, LA
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA14LA094
- 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 150H
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 150
- 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
- N684RA
- Operator
- Charles E. Puckett · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cullman Regional Airport-Folsom Field (KCMD), Cullman, ALTo L38 · Gonzales, LA
- Aircraft age
- About 45 years (built 1968)
- 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 starvation
- 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 › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After purchasing the airplane, the pilot serviced it with fuel at the self-service pump and then departed on the cross-country flight to his home airport. About 1.4 hours into the flight, he noticed the fuel quantity displayed on the fuel gauges rapidly decreasing and the electrical system "discharging." (Although the pilot reported he had been flying for 45 minutes, based on the takeoff and landing location, the airplane traveled 140 miles; the airplane's cruise speed is 100 mph; therefore, he had been flying about 1.4 hours.) The pilot chose to conduct a precautionary landing to a field. Upon landing, the nose gear dug into the soft soil, and the airplane then nosed over and came to rest inverted, which resulted in substantial damage to the engine firewall. According to the pilot, the engine was running "fine" throughout the flight, and it never stopped producing power.
The pilot recovered and disassembled the airplane before reporting the accident. During recovery, he noted that one of the two 13-gallon fuel tanks was empty and that the other tank contained about 1/4 tank of fuel (about 3 to 4 gallons), which confirmed that his fuel gauges were reading accurately. After the accident, only one fuel cap was recovered from the airplane, and a similar fuel cap was recovered at the self-service pump at the departure airport. Interpolation of performance data revealed that, at a 6 gallon-per-hour fuel consumption rate, the airplane would have consumed about 8 gallons of fuel. With one fuel tank venting overboard and the engine consuming 8 gallons of fuel from the other tank, the airplane would have contained about 4 gallons of fuel at landing.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate soft-field technique during the precautionary landing, which resulted in a nose-over. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's inadequate preflight inspection, which resulted in departure with an open fuel port and the subsequent in-flight, overboard venting of the fuel supply.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA14LA094
- Event ID
- 20140116X15627
- Case number
- ERA14LA094
- 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: bd3800226c83c0f68c1d9b44b3df53987a2add0612cccd7b930ce4a84c476f82; retrieved 2026-09-15T23:15:37.997Z.