WPR22LA041 · Piper PA-28-180
Red Rock Flying School Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: fuel starvation on approach
From Falcon Field (FFZ) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR22LA041
- 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-28-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N9467J
- Operator
- Red Rock Flying School
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Falcon Field (FFZ), Mesa, AZTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 55 years (built 1966)
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that, he calculated 30 gallons of fuel to complete the accident flight and then departed the airport with 36 gallons of fuel onboard. A few minutes later he returned to the departure airport after he noticed that the door was not latched properly. The subsequent departure and flight were uneventful until the pilot was approaching his destination and had been cleared to land. At this time, he observed the fuel tanks were between 0 and 10 gallons on each side. He then selected the left fuel tank as it appeared to have more fuel, but within one minute the engine lost power. The pilot then notified air traffic control that he would not make the runway and landed in a dirt lot, which resulted in substantial damage to the right aileron and wings. The pilot reported no preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. He stated that the operator traveled to the site and observed about 4 gallons in the right fuel tank and no fuel in the left tank. The pilot further reported that the accident was the result of fuel starvation, inaccuracy of the fuel gauges and improper fuel planning.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate fuel management which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel starvation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR22LA041
- Event ID
- 20211119104274
- Case number
- WPR22LA041
- 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: 899a941e5568523bf6692067d28bdb1a98e8e82c7d55c5c667d212afac45698c; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:46:03.514Z.