GAA18CA419 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Destin Executive Airport (DTS) to Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport (ECP)
Event
- NTSB case
- GAA18CA419
- 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
Cessna 152
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 152
- 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
- N89887
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Destin Executive Airport (DTS), Destin, FLTo Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport (ECP), Panama City, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 40 years (built 1978)
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that, 15 minutes into a cross-country flight, the airplane's engine lost rpm. He added power, and the engine regained rpm briefly before losing all power. The pilot selected a dirt road for an emergency landing, during which the nose landing gear touched down on a soft surface, and the airplane nosed over.
The airplane sustained substantial damage to the left and right wings and the front windshield.
The pilot reported that the airplane had 4.5 gallons of fuel on board at the last takeoff. A Federal Aviation Administration inspector reported that, during postaccident examination of the airplane, the fuel tanks were found empty. The gascolator had residual fuel, and about 1 gallon of fuel was removed from the fuselage fuel drain. He added that, according to the manufacturer's specifications, the airplane should have had 1.5 gallons of unusable fuel. He turned on the airplane's master power switch to view the fuel quantity gauge indications, and the left-wing tank gauge indicated between empty and a quarter full with no fuel in the tank, and the right-wing fuel tank gauge indicated empty.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper preflight fuel planning, which resulted in fuel exhaustion and a subsequent total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record GAA18CA419
- Event ID
- 20180630X45334
- Case number
- GAA18CA419
- 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, coordinates. 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: c504000c5420c8c5af136710ced53e75dbc4d831321b93ecb6ea00e3ee095b5f; retrieved 2026-09-16T07:43:08.742Z.