ERA21LA392 · Piper PA-16
Piper PA-16 · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Mount Olive Municipal Airport (W40) to La Porte Municipal Airport (T41)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA21LA392
- 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
Piper PA-16
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-16
- 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
- N5656H
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Mount Olive Municipal Airport (W40), Mount Olive, NCTo La Porte Municipal Airport (T41), La Porte, TX
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that he and his friend went to purchase an airplane from an airport in North Carolina. After an inspection and test flight of the airplane, he stated that, “we filled both tanks and called it a day.” The pilot returned the next day to pick up the airplane and said that he checked the fuel tanks and they looked full. He departed the airport enroute home and climbed to an altitude of 4,500 ft. He was aloft for 3 hours, using the right tank for 1 hour 30 minutes, followed by the left tank for 1 hour 30 minutes. He said that the engine “quit running” and he switched back to the right fuel tank. The engine started and ran for a few minutes before stopping again. The pilot elected to conduct an emergency landing on a rough logging road. After the emergency landing, the pilot checked the fuel tanks and stated that they were both empty. During a telephone interview with the pilot, he stated that his friend refueled the airplane, and he did not know how much fuel was put into the tanks. The Federal Aviation Administration inspector who responded to the scene confirmed that both fuel tanks were empty of fuel. He did not observe any breaches of the fuel tanks, nor did he find any anomalies of the fueling system. During inspection of the airplane by a mechanic, structural damage was discovered on the firewall. The engine mount was also observed buckled.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate preflight planning and fuel system inspection, which resulted in fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA21LA392
- Event ID
- 20211013104094
- Case number
- ERA21LA392
- 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, 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: df5745b14fa4ed55c35b74f3bc280dd1f3ed22a67e4a9e5cdd7ff4c77c4d5221; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:39:48.612Z.