CEN22LA220 · Grumman American AVN. CORP. AA-1B
Grumman American AVN. CORP. AA-1B · Accident: fuel exhaustion on approach
From St Croix Riviera Airport (6WI2) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN22LA220
- 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
Grumman American AVN. CORP. AA-1B
- Aircraft type
- Grumman American AA-1
- 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
- N6298L
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From St Croix Riviera Airport (6WI2), River Falls, WITo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 50 years (built 1972)
- 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 base
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and student pilot reported problems with the airplane’s engine shortly after takeoff. The flight instructor stated that the engine “quit abruptly” and “seized,” and the student pilot stated that the engine “locked up” and lost total power. The flight instructor assumed control of the airplane and made a forced landing in a field, which resulted in substantial damage to the airplane’s left wing. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed no fuel remaining in the wing tanks and no evidence of a fuel spill. The fuel system was not compromised. According to the accident report submitted by the flight instructor they departed with 8 gallons of fuel and were flying for about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Postaccident examination revealed that the engine rotated freely, and compression was verified on all cylinders. Both magnetos produced spark when rotated. Thus, the engine likely lost power due to fuel exhaustion.
Probable cause
The student pilot’s and flight instructor’s inadequate preflight fuel planning, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN22LA220
- Event ID
- 20220601105171
- Case number
- CEN22LA220
- 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: 6ae5a42e0b5412eb54edf18f13f1bc294b7dd0aefc35ac8900e2d38d4b5ae4bd; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:16:47.199Z.