ERA21LA380 · Cessna 177 B
Cessna 177 B · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Intervale Airport (NH86) to Minute Man Air Field (6B6)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA21LA380
- 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
Cessna 177 B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 177
- 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
- N912VW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Intervale Airport (NH86), Henniker, NHTo Minute Man Air Field (6B6), Stow, MA
- Aircraft age
- About 53 years (built 1968)
- 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 starvation
- 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
After concluding a visit with a family member, the pilot conducted a preflight of his airplane and departed for his home airport which was 1-hour away and planned to stop for fuel enroute. During the preflight he noticed that he had about 9 gallons of gasoline in the left-wing fuel tank, and none in the right-wing fuel tank so he decided to fly with the fuel selector in the left wing fuel tank position instead of in the “BOTH ON” position as specified for takeoff in the owner’s manual. While at 2,800 feet above mean sea level, when he was about 6.7 miles from his chosen enroute fueling location, the airplane’s engine began to sputter and then incurred a complete loss of power. The pilot then made an off-airport emergency landing in a parking lot, and during the landing roll, the airplane struck a 4- to 5-foot-high pile of debris at the edge of the parking lot. Examination of the airplane revealed that it was substantially damaged, and there was no usable fuel present in either the left- or right-wing fuel tank, or the firewall mounted fuel strainer. During the investigation it was revealed that the pilot had passed up three other airports during the flight as the gas was 20 cents per gallon cheaper at his chosen fuel stop. It was also further revealed that, the pilot would deduce his fuel burn by rules of thumb using one single fuel burn number, rather than using the published cruise and range performance that was in the owner’s manual, and that he was using a fuel dipstick during preflight from another airplane model that was not calibrated for his airplane model, to help determine the amount of fuel in his fuel tanks.
Probable cause
The pilot’ improper preflight and inflight planning which resulted in fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA21LA380
- Event ID
- 20210927103971
- Case number
- ERA21LA380
- 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: 40662f1fdfa28524050ec8ca7a32ae77bd8f5135e19e9ff80e45f93ac4c9d5df; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:35:00.336Z.