WPR17LA092 · Piper PA 28-140
Piper PA 28-140 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) while maneuvering
From French Valley Airport (F70) to San Diego, CA
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR17LA092
- 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
Piper PA 28-140
- 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
- N55339
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From French Valley Airport (F70), Temecula, CATo San Diego, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 44 years (built 1973)
- 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
- Maneuvering · low-altitude flying
- 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 › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Physical
- Personnel issues › Psychological
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot reported to local law enforcement that, while he was flying at 1,000 ft, the airplane's engine experienced a total loss of power. He subsequently conducted a forced landing onto a large trucking yard. The landing site was about 61 miles northwest of the departure airport and in the opposite direction of his intended destination.
Examination of the airplane revealed that the fuel selector was set to the right fuel tank. The master electrical switch was "ON," the right fuel gauge indicated empty, and the left fuel gauge indicated between 0 and 5 gallons. The fuel tanks were intact and undamaged. It is likely that the loss of engine power was the result of fuel starvation.
Responding law enforcement officers reported that they could smell a strong odor of alcohol emitting from the pilot's breath/person. A formal blood test, which was administered about 5 hours after the accident, revealed that the pilot had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.16%. The effects of ethanol on aviators are generally well understood; it significantly impairs pilots' performance, even at very low levels. Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibit any person from acting or attempting to act as a crewmember of a civil aircraft while having 0.040 gm/dl or more ethanol in the blood.
Probable cause
The pilot's impaired decision-making due to alcohol intoxication and his improper fuel management, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel starvation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR17LA092
- Event ID
- 20170428X63504
- Case number
- WPR17LA092
- 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 2017-04-04.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 9b931efa5328facda93d5a4816f5fad4d1a536e52c87dc76ae3a5ab027e48eb9; retrieved 2026-09-16T05:12:22.851Z.