ERA18LA186 · Piper PA34 220T
Piper PA34 220T · Accident: fuel exhaustion during landing
From Lafayette Regional Airport (LFT) to Jack Edwards National Airport (JKA)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA18LA186
- 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 PA34 220T
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA34
- 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
- N294AB
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lafayette Regional Airport (LFT), Lafayette, LATo Jack Edwards National Airport (JKA), Gulf Shores, AL
- Aircraft age
- About 37 years (built 1981)
- 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
- Landing · aborted after touchdown
- 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 as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot departed in the twin-engine airplane with an estimated quantity of fuel. While landing at the destination airport, the airplane bounced and the pilot aborted the landing. During the subsequent climb, the left engine surged several times before it lost all power. The pilot attempted to restore left engine power by placing the auxiliary fuel pump switch to "high" and selecting "crossfeed" on the left fuel selector, but restoration of continuous engine power was unsuccessful.
When the left engine stopped producing power, the stall horn sounded, and the controls "started to buffet." The pilot said that he had "no time" to consult the emergency checklist and considered multiple forced landing areas before he chose to land straight ahead into trees. The airplane came to rest upright with substantial damage to both wings and the fuselage. There was an odor of fuel at the scene, but there was no evidence of fuel or fuel spillage.
Examination and testing of the engines revealed no pre-impact mechanical anomalies that would have precluded normal operation. The airplane's best single-engine rate of climb given the conditions present at the time of the accident was about 280 ft per minute.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper preflight and in-flight fuel planning, which resulted in fuel exhaustion to the left engine and a total loss of engine power during an attempted go-around maneuver.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA18LA186
- Event ID
- 20180707X14347
- Case number
- ERA18LA186
- 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: 04e689a930f90f356cd1fb309b366a3f0b85ab8088393a8d7eb353e464039abf; retrieved 2026-09-16T07:46:11.740Z.