ERA14CA206 · Cessna 172I
Redstone Arsenal Flying Activity, BLDG 4828 Cessna 172I · Accident: fuel exhaustion on approach
From Enterprise Municipal Airport (EDN) to Huntsville International Airport (HSV)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA14CA206
- 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 172I
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N35553
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Enterprise Municipal Airport (EDN), Enterprise, ALTo Huntsville International Airport (HSV), Huntsville, AL
- Aircraft age
- About 46 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
- Approach · VFR pattern downwind
- 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 pilot departed on the two-hour flight with the fuel quantity gauge of each fuel tank indicating about half full, but did not otherwise verify the quantity of fuel present in the tanks prior to the flight. Approximately 20 minutes from the destination airport, the left fuel tank gauge indicated between empty and one-quarter full, and the right tank gauge indicated one-quarter full. On the downwind leg of the airport traffic pattern, the engine began to "sputter" and experienced a total loss of power. The pilot moved the fuel selector to the right tank, but engine power was not restored. The pilot subsequently conducted a forced landing to the grass short of the runway, and the airplane nosed over and came to rest inverted, resulting in substantial damage to the engine firewall. Postaccident examination by a Federal Aviation Administration inspector revealed that the left fuel tank contained no fuel, and the right tank contained approximately one half of a pint of fuel. The tanks were not damaged during the accident sequence, and there was no evidence of fuel spillage at the scene. The pilot reported there were no mechanical malfunctions or anomalies of the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper fuel planning, which resulted in fuel exhaustion and a total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA14CA206
- Event ID
- 20140422X35013
- Case number
- ERA14CA206
- 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, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2014-04-22.
- API snapshot SHA-256: c17f419f1a36c553794e82314a7b869980b097f7bcbe50bc902ba35097c8f5ce; retrieved 2026-09-15T23:32:09.619Z.