ERA17LA188 · Maule M7 235C
Maule M7 235C · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Tupper Lake, NY (no airport) to Potsdam Municipal Airport Damon Field (PTD)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA17LA188
- 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
Maule M7 235C
- Aircraft type
- Maule M7
- 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
- N126MC
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tupper Lake, NY (no airport)To Potsdam Municipal Airport Damon Field (PTD), Potsdam, NY
- Aircraft age
- About 18 years (built 1999)
- 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 starvation
- 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 conducting a personal flight in the amphibious airplane, which he had recently purchased from the commercial pilot who was onboard the airplane. The private pilot stated that he entered a 30° right bank turn and that, about 6 to 7 seconds into the turn, the engine lost total power. The commercial pilot tried to restart the engine while the private pilot leveled the airplane and looked for a place to land. The commercial pilot told the private pilot to switch the fuel selector from the right main tank to both tanks, which he did, but the engine would not restart. The commercial pilot took control of the airplane and subsequently conducted a gear-up, forced landing to a field, which resulted in substantial damage to both floats, the wing struts, both wings, the fuselage, and the firewall.
Postaccident examination of the fuel system revealed no evidence of any mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. The commercial pilot reported that the right main tank had about 5 to 7 gallons of fuel in it when the airplane entered the right turn and that the engine "definitely died due to fuel starvation," which had happened to him before when he owned the airplane. According to the airframe manufacturer, in an uncoordinated turn, it is possible to unport fuel to the lines that carry fuel to the engine, which would result in a power loss. The chances of a loss of engine power occurring increases when there is a low quantity of fuel in the tank. Therefore, it is likely the fuel unported during the right turn because the right tank was low on fuel, which resulted in fuel starvation and the subsequent loss of engine power.
Probable cause
The pilots' initiation of an uncoordinated right turn with the fuel selector positioned to the right main fuel tank, which had a low quantity of fuel in it and resulted in a total loss of engine power due to the unporting of the fuel and subsequent fuel starvation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA17LA188
- Event ID
- 20170524X50728
- Case number
- ERA17LA188
- 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: a4777e4e6df3d5a3749f3f394acd9cd97073fd5ac8963f291c8799d4bd7fdaea; retrieved 2026-09-16T05:19:08.674Z.