CEN14TA421 · Piper PA 28-180
Piper PA 28-180 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Chennault International Airport (CWF) to Orange County Airport (ORG)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN14TA421
- 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
- Government
- 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 28-180
- 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
- N4286T
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chennault International Airport (CWF), Lake Charles, LATo Orange County Airport (ORG), Orange, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 43 years (built 1971)
- 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
- Public Aircraft
- 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 · climb to 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
- Loss of engine power (total)
- 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 reported that the airplane's engine lost power about 5 minutes after takeoff and that the starter would not engage to facilitate a restart. He then executed a landing on a highway, during which the landing gear collapsed. After the accident, a first responder who held a pilot certificate examined the fuel tanks and found no fuel in the left fuel tank and that the right fuel tank was full. Additionally, the first responder found the fuel selector positioned to the left tank. No fuel leaks were detected. During recovery of the airplane, 22 gallons of fuel were drained from the right wing fuel tank and about 3 ounces of fuel were drained from the left wing fuel tank. Postaccident examination of the airplane and engine, including the engine starter, revealed no preimpact anomalies. The pilot provided fuel planning information that indicated that the airplane should have had sufficient fuel to complete the flight on a single tank; however, the pilot did not position the fuel selector to the full tank. Therefore, it is likely that the engine power loss was due to fuel starvation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to properly manage the airplane’s fuel supply, which led to fuel starvation and a total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN14TA421
- Event ID
- 20140812X10218
- Case number
- CEN14TA421
- 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: 08a6a0e857284339b88fd4bef45da3c253135ba159bcc50b24ed2a8d650b03fe; retrieved 2026-09-16T01:37:46.997Z.