ERA16LA091 · Cessna 152
Florida Flyers Flight Academy Cessna 152 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Northeast Florida Regional Airport (SGJ) to Gwinnett County Briscoe Field (LZU)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA16LA091
- 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 152
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 152
- 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
- N6135M
- Operator
- Florida Flyers Flight Academy
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Northeast Florida Regional Airport (SGJ), St. Augustine, FLTo Gwinnett County Briscoe Field (LZU), Lawrenceville, GA
- Aircraft age
- About 36 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
- 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
- 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
- Pole
- 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 as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot reported that he visually checked the fuel tanks before conducting the personal flight and verified that they were full with a total of 26 gallons (24.5 usable) before the personal flight departed; fuel receipts corroborated that the airplane was refueled before the flight. The pilot stated that, shortly after he descended the airplane from 5,500 ft mean sea level (msl) and then leveled off at 3,500 ft msl, about 3.5 hours into the flight, the engine began running roughly and then lost power. The pilot's attempts to restart the engine were unsuccessful. The pilot subsequently executed a forced landing to a road, and the airplane collided with a pole.
The Pilot's Operating Handbook stated that the airplane had about 3.1 hours of fuel endurance at cruise power. Responders to the accident site reported that there was no fuel in the fuel tanks. Further, after the accident, the pilot stated that the engine likely "ran out of gas." Therefore, the engine lost power due to fuel exhaustion as a result of the pilot's improper fuel planning.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper fuel planning, 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 ERA16LA091
- Event ID
- 20160118X02647
- Case number
- ERA16LA091
- 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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2016-01-18.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 15da9838760e538d3878a3608cb015e69712cff8977572f1e28d77c509891a9a; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:05:37.648Z.