ERA16LA291 · Luscombe 8 A
Luscombe 8 A · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Old Bridge Airport (3N6) to Old Bridge Airport (3N6)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA16LA291
- 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
Luscombe 8 A
- Aircraft type
- Luscombe 8
- 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
- N71497
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Old Bridge Airport (3N6), Old Bridge, NJTo Old Bridge Airport (3N6), Old Bridge, NJ
- Aircraft age
- About 70 years (built 1946)
- 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 · 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
- 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 private pilot was on a local personal flight and, after flying about 1.5 hours, the engine experienced a total loss of engine power that he could not restore. He maneuvered the airplane for a forced landing in a field, but the airplane impacted the ground in a nose- and left-wing-low attitude, which resulted in substantial damage to the airframe. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed no fuel remaining in the intact fuel tank and only residual fuel remaining in the fuel strainer and carburetor. The glass face of the fuel tank quantity indicator gauge was scratched and cloudy. The examination revealed no evidence of preimpact failures or malfunctions of the engine or engine accessories that would have precluded normal operation. Thus, it is likely that the pilot did not adequately manage the fuel supply during flight, and the scratched and cloudy glass face of the fuel quantity indicator gauge may have led the pilot to misinterpret how much fuel was remaining.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate in-flight fuel management, which resulted in fuel exhaustion and the subsequent total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA16LA291
- Event ID
- 20160815X43320
- Case number
- ERA16LA291
- 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: a2b737f18bbf8dd9b77a2cb9024db83606f0ee4f755f2edfe31cabe276a157e5; retrieved 2026-09-16T04:09:37.787Z.