CEN14LA350 · Piper PA 28R-200
Piper PA 28R-200 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Mt. Vernon, TX to Winnsboro Municipal Airport (F51)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN14LA350
- 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
- 0
- 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 28R-200
- 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
- N9469N
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Mt. Vernon, TXTo Winnsboro Municipal Airport (F51), Winnsboro, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 45 years (built 1969)
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A witness reported that the engine was "backfiring" and that it "shut off" as the airplane flew over treetops low to the ground. The pilot made a forced landing, and, during the descent, the airplane collided with trees, continued into a field, and came to rest upright. Postaccident examination revealed no evidence of fuel in the fuel tanks or on the ground near the airplane, and no fuel was found in the fuel lines or the engine-driven fuel pump. The gascolator was half full of fuel; however, if adequate fuel had been available, it is likely that the gascolator would have been full of fuel. Based on the evidence, it is likely that the pilot did not conduct an adequate preflight inspection, which resulted in the airplane departing with insufficient fuel and resulted in a loss of engine power.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate preflight inspection, 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 CEN14LA350
- Event ID
- 20140710X35558
- Case number
- CEN14LA350
- 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: ea0b6b6b8fff8076d9401a3088a13dc3ebc122c5447ecd875ecc776d3f332057; retrieved 2026-09-16T00:53:03.364Z.