ERA20CA090 · Pitts A Undesignat
Pitts A Undesignat · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From William L. Whitehurst Field (M08) to William L. Whitehurst Field (M08)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA20CA090
- 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
Pitts A Undesignat
- Aircraft type
- Pitts A
- 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
- N113A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From William L. Whitehurst Field (M08), Bolivar, TNTo William L. Whitehurst Field (M08), Bolivar, TN
- Aircraft age
- About 52 years (built 1967)
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that the airplane departed with 17.5 gallons of fuel and about 1 hour and 25 minutes after departure the engine lost power. He attempted to restart the engine using the boost pump to no avail. The pilot elected to make an off-airport landing to a road; during the landing the airplane landed hard and the left main landing gear collapsed resulting in substantial damage to both wings and the firewall. Both the wing fuel tanks were examined and no evidence of fuel remained in either tank. The pilot reported that there were no preaccident mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. The pilot reported as a safety recommendation that more thoughtfully studying the fuel consumption "break in" period could have prevented the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper fuel planning which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA20CA090
- Event ID
- 20191219X95252
- Case number
- ERA20CA090
- 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: 801c2f14aa2dc0b52773dd151ba5ea51b1aca3f169765e899c18643fa067de0d; retrieved 2026-09-16T10:47:25.274Z.