CEN20LA422 · Aeronca 7AC
Aeronca 7AC · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Toussant, OH to Marshall County Airport (MPG)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN20LA422
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
Aeronca 7AC
- Aircraft type
- Aeronca 7
- 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
- N81624
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Toussant, OHTo Marshall County Airport (MPG), Moundsville, WV
- Aircraft age
- About 75 years (built 1945)
- 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 › Action/decision
- 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 she was 12 miles from her planned refueling destination when the airplane’s engine lost power. She performed a forced landing to a grass field during which the airplane’s main landing gear was damaged. Further inspection revealed that the airplane sustained substantial damage to forward fuselage beneath the cabin area. A Federal Aviation Administration inspector who traveled to the accident scene reported that the airplane’s fuel tank was empty. There were no preaccident mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. The pilot reported that she departed with 13 gallons of fuel and had calculated the fuel burn for that leg of flight at 9.4 gallons of fuel for a 2 hour and 5 minute flight.
Probable cause
The pilots improper fuel planning that 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 CEN20LA422
- Event ID
- 20200928102049
- Case number
- CEN20LA422
- 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, cause areas. 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: 96fe4faef1e19775a0751bf2937bd470dccf17e35617f6b12c7acd9dc7e2e2b5; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:07:59.906Z.