WPR21LA097 · Cessna 170A
Cessna 170A · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Ketchikan International Airport (KTN) to William R Fairchild International Airport (CLM)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR21LA097
- 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
Cessna 170A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 170
- 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
- N9114A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ketchikan International Airport (KTN), Ketchikan, AKTo William R Fairchild International Airport (CLM), Port Angeles, WA
- Aircraft age
- About 72 years (built 1949)
- 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 had departed on a long cross-country flight and stopped to refuel at which point he filled up both wing tanks and the pilot had modified the airplane with a tank in the fuselage. During the flight, the pilot sent text messages to a family member expressing concerns about having enough fuel to complete the flight. The pilot texted that the headwinds were stronger than he expected, he was encountering turbulence, and he was having to maneuver around clouds. Radar data showed that the airplane was over a 10 nautical mile wide body of water when the pilot made a mayday call stating that he was going into the water. The airplane ditched in the sea and was never recovered.
The search and rescue efforts did not locate the airplane.
Probable cause
The total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion, which resulted from the pilot's inadequate in-flight fuel planning.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR21LA097
- Event ID
- 20210129102572
- Case number
- WPR21LA097
- 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 2021-01-27.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 74d2f9ce0827d81d25d9242557bc1d306c0b1f0a61a17728b85f02c825d93fd1; retrieved 2026-09-15T07:24:54.979Z.