ERA14FA162 · Piper PA-28-181
Piper PA-28-181 · Accident: fuel exhaustion on approach
From John C Tune Airport (JWN) to St. Petersburg Clearwater International Airport (PIE)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA14FA162
- 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
- 2 · 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-28-181
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N8309L
- Operator
- Jeffrey A Bronken · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From John C Tune Airport (JWN), Nashville, TNTo St. Petersburg Clearwater International Airport (PIE), Clearwater, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 34 years (built 1980)
- 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
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Wire
- 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, not marked as estimated; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the night cross-country flight, the airplane had been flying for 4 hours 21 minutes and was about 6 miles from the destination airport when the pilot reported a fuel emergency to air traffic control. The pilot stated that he was going to attempt to land on a highway; however, the airplane collided with 160-ft-tall power lines that crossed the highway. Examination of the wreckage did not reveal any preimpact mechanical malfunctions of the airframe or engine, and only a few ounces of fuel were recovered from the wreckage. The airplane held 48 usable gallons of fuel and consumed about 10.5 gallons per hour, resulting in an expected endurance of 4 hours 35 minutes, which does not account for fuel used during taxi, takeoff, and climb. The pilot's toxicology results were positive for cocaine, and impairment from cocaine likely affected his preflight fuel planning abilities and en route fuel management.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate fuel planning, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's impairment due to cocaine use.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA14FA162
- Event ID
- 20140322X60839
- Case number
- ERA14FA162
- 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: 22b36cdab84d1c9495f2bb7131e60ed58ac21cbbe69be1903fce0805c962e633; retrieved 2026-09-14T16:12:02.151Z.