WPR22LA166 · Cessna 170B
Cessna 170B · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Ferry County Airport (KR49) to Enumclaw Airport (WA77)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR22LA166
- 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 170B
- 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
- N4398B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ferry County Airport (KR49), Republic, WATo Enumclaw Airport (WA77), Enumclaw, WA
- Aircraft age
- About 67 years (built 1955)
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot flew and picked up a passenger for a cross-country flight with multiple intermediate legs and a return destination to his original departure airport. About 1 hour and 20 minutes into the accident leg, about 3,000 ft above the ground, the engine lost all power. The pilot restarted the engine, but it lost all power again about 30 seconds later. The pilot then maneuvered the airplane towards a road for a forced landing. The airplane struck treetops and came to rest upright on a riverbank. Recovery of the airplane revealed that less than a gallon of fuel was retrieved from the two 20-gallon wing fuel tanks. Postaccident examination of the airplane and engine did not reveal any preimpact mechanical anomalies. The pilot stated that the engine consumed 12 gallons of fuel per hour and calculated that he had about 3 hours of flight time after filling the aircraft with 34–36 gallons of fuel. Fuel planning calculations revealed that at the time of the loss of engine power, the airplane flew for a total of about 2.8 hours and would have consumed about 42 gallons of fuel. It is likely that the pilot exhausted all usable fuel as he decided to divert to another airport without proper fuel planning.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion as a result of the pilot’s inadequate fuel planning.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR22LA166
- Event ID
- 20220426104998
- Case number
- WPR22LA166
- 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 2022-04-24.
- API snapshot SHA-256: ca9d4131691afa91b6f8f5ecf0f37a7efa9a2309fa1aeb78203e4d3fe2c8a239; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:10:23.455Z.