Wiggins Airways Flight 1042
Embraer EMB-110P1 · Incident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Manchester-Boston Regional Airport (MHT) to BVT · Burlington, VT
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA14IA249
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
Embraer EMB-110P1
- Aircraft type
- Embraer EMB-110
- 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
- N116WA
- Operator
- Wiggins Airways
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Manchester-Boston Regional Airport (MHT), Manchester, NHTo BVT · Burlington, VT
- Aircraft age
- About 32 years (built 1982)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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 · cruise
- 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
- Minor
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, 1,000 lbs of fuel was to be added to each fuel tank the night before the incident flight. The next morning, he conducted a preflight inspection and reported seeing 1,000 lbs per side and then departed the home base airport on the cargo flight. The pilot reported that, while in cruise flight, the fuel low-pressure light illuminated, followed shortly thereafter by the right engine and then the left engine shutting down. The pilot subsequently diverted the flight to a nearby airport. Upon touchdown, the pilot used "aggressive braking." The left tire subsequently deflated, the airplane veered left, the left main landing gear departed the paved portion of the runway, and then the right tire deflated.
Following the incident, maintenance personnel conducted a fuel quantity gauge accuracy test, and no abnormalities or malfunctions were noted that would have precluded normal operation. Postincident examination of the fuel system revealed that the fuel tanks were devoid of fuel. The fuel caps were found secure and in place, and no evidence of any preaccident mechanical malfunction or failure was found. There was no evidence of any fuel staining or leakage.
A review of the airplane's fueling records revealed that it was last refueled over a week before the incident; it was not fueled the night before the incident as requested by the pilot. During that week, the airplane was flown about 1.9 flight hours; 1,100 lbs of fuel remained after that flight. Maintenance personnel subsequently conducted multiple engine performance runs and two taxi repositions, which consumed about 600 lbs of fuel, leaving about 500 lbs of fuel, which was also reported by a maintenance technician after the most recent test run before the flight. Given the lack of any preexisting mechanical anomalies and that no fuel was recovered from the airplane, it is likely that the engine lost power due to fuel exhaustion because of the pilot's inadequate preflight inspection.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight inspection, 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 ERA14IA249
- Event ID
- 20140521X71202
- Case number
- ERA14IA249
- 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: 4d61e617e1fb434aa4b45a62967920abd351feae27ff5cca061c72a1de9dd2a9; retrieved 2026-09-15T23:38:44.773Z.