CEN16LA381 · Scottish Aviation SERIES 100 MDL 101
Scottish Aviation SERIES 100 MDL 101 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Augusta Municipal Airport (3AU) to Augusta Municipal Airport (3AU)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16LA381
- 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
Scottish Aviation SERIES 100 MDL 101
- Aircraft type
- Scottish SERIES 100
- 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
- N432BD
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Augusta Municipal Airport (3AU), Augusta Muni, KSTo Augusta Municipal Airport (3AU), Augusta Muni, KS
- Aircraft age
- About 44 years (built 1972)
- 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 › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot reported that the engine "sputtered and went to idle" during cruise flight while returning to the departure airport after a local flight. His attempts to restore engine power were not successful. The pilot subsequently conducted a forced landing, during which the airplane impacted a fence and sustained substantial damage.
During postaccident examination, the fuel totalizer indicated that 7.3 gallons of fuel remained; however, only about 1.5 gallons of fuel was recovered from the airplane. After fuel was added to each tank, an engine run was conducted, and the engine ran smoothly at idle and about 1,000 rpm, and no anomalies were noted.
The pilot reported that the airplane fuel gauges were unreliable, so he used the fuel totalizer for fuel quantity information. However, the totalizer's operating instructions stated that the instrument does not provide a measurement of the fuel in the tanks and that it "should never be used as the primary indicator of the fuel quantity." The pilot should not have used the totalizer to determine the amount of fuel onboard the airplane and his reliance on the instrument without ensuring that sufficient fuel was on board for the flight led to fuel exhaustion and a total loss of engine power.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper preflight inspection during which he relied on the fuel totalizer and failed to ensure that sufficient fuel was onboard for the flight, which resulted in fuel exhaustion and a total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16LA381
- Event ID
- 20160923X14144
- Case number
- CEN16LA381
- 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: a733641ffacf3dcf658a7098500b8071f30979c80142b46dd276dff6f651ecc5; retrieved 2026-09-16T04:18:19.384Z.