CEN19FA093 · Piper PA28 180
Piper PA28 180 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From PSK · London, KY to Downtown Airport (3DW)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's departure or destination. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN19FA093
- 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
- 1 · 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 PA28 180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA28
- 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
- N7369W
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route Possible conflict
- From PSK · London, KYTo Downtown Airport (3DW), Springfield, MO
- Aircraft age
- About 56 years (built 1963)
- 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 · cruise
- 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 pilot was conducting a multileg cross-country flight and had last refueled the airplane with 26.98 gallons of fuel about 375 miles from the accident location and about 450 miles from the destination airport. After departure from the last fuel stop, the pilot continued on the final leg of the flight in dark night conditions. Radar data consistent with the accident flight showed the airplane on course about 5,000 ft mean sea level for about 4 hours. Just before the end of the radar track, the airplane began descending, then turned north and then southeast. The airplane impacted trees and terrain. The right wing separated and the fuselage was buckled.
The wreckage of the airplane was found on wooded, hilly terrain the next morning by a motorist on a nearby road. The airplane impacted the trees and terrain in an attitude, consistent with a forced landing. The dark night conditions likely would have made it difficult for the pilot to see the trees during the landing.
Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the two fuel tanks were not compromised; the left fuel tank was empty, and the right fuel tank contained only a minimal amount of fuel. Only a trace amount of fuel was found in the fuel lines and fuel pump. The damage to the propeller blades was consistent with little or no engine power at the time of impact. No preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airframe or engine were noted during the examination, although the emergency locator transmitter was found to be inoperable.
The airplane averaged about 94 knots ground speed during the flight, and the entire flight from the fuel stop to the destination airport should have taken about 4 hours 48 minutes at that speed. Although the extent of the pilot’s preflight fuel planning and in-flight fuel monitoring could not be determined, with a fuel burn rate of 10 gallons per hour, there was not enough fuel to complete the planned flight with the required 45-minute night flight fuel reserve. Thus, the pilot’s preflight fuel planning was likely inadequate, and the engine lost power due to fuel exhaustion.
Although the emergency locator transmitter did not activate, there was insufficient information from which to determine whether or how this affected survivability in this accident.
Probable cause
The total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s inadequate preflight fuel planning and in-flight fuel monitoring.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN19FA093
- Event ID
- 20190306X00748
- Case number
- CEN19FA093
- 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, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2019-03-06.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 826c4a12fb2b7df53450632885037d087ddb0c29c9fa7793d2e11f13078e13d0; retrieved 2026-09-15T06:55:03.908Z.