GAA18CA152 · Piper PA 32R 301T
Piper PA 32R 301T · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Georgetown Executive Airport at Johnny Gantt Field (GTU) to Midland Airpark (MDD)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- GAA18CA152
- 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 32R 301T
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N8191B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Georgetown Executive Airport at Johnny Gantt Field (GTU), Georgetown, TXTo Midland Airpark (MDD), Midland, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 38 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
- Wire
- 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
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
- Personnel issues › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that, although the airplane's fuel gauge was providing intermittent information, he decided to depart on a night cross-country flight. During the flight, the engine lost power. The pilot declared an emergency and selected a road to land on. During the landing, the airplane struck power line wires, impacted the ground, and came to rest inverted.
The airplane sustained substantial damage to both wings, the engine mounts, the rudder and the horizontal stabilizer.
Examination of the airplane by a Federal Aviation Administration Aviation safety inspector revealed that the fuel selector was set to the right-wing tank, and there was no usable fuel in the right-wing tank. The left-wing tank contained usable fuel.
Per Title 14 CFR 91.205, no person may operate a powered civil aircraft with a standard category US airworthiness certificate with an inoperative fuel gauge.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to manage the airplane’s fuel supply, which resulted in fuel starvation. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s decision to attempt the flight with an inoperative fuel gauge.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record GAA18CA152
- Event ID
- 20180309X21441
- Case number
- GAA18CA152
- 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 2018-03-09.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 89d94af7f6b491c035c57fd3b8ebea47dc2b97022dafc341466d7467e6cc44e8; retrieved 2026-09-16T06:36:14.852Z.