ERA23LA208 · Vans RV6 A
Vans RV6 A · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Moraine Air Park (I73) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA23LA208
- 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
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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
Vans RV6 A
- Aircraft type
- Vans RV6
- 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
- N327WC
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Moraine Air Park (I73), Moraine, OHTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 3 years (built 2020)
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot of the experimental amateur-built airplane purchased it the day before the accident. After the purchase, the pilot completed two flights in the airplane uneventfully. The next day, during the third flight, the engine lost all power and the airplane nosed over in a field during a forced landing, coming to rest inverted. Postaccident examination of the wreckage revealed that both fuel tanks were absent of fuel and there was no evidence of fuel spillage at the accident site. No evidence of any preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures of the airplane’s automotive conversion engine were observed. When asked after the accident how much fuel was onboard when the airplane was delivered, and how much (if any) was added to it, the pilot responded that he did not know. The pilot believed that during a previous flight he had started with around 35 gallons and that 8 to 10 gallons should have been onboard at the time of the accident based on the airplane’s fuel quantity gauges. The previous owner stated that the airplane was delivered with approximately 3 gallons in the right-wing fuel tank and 10 gallons in the left-wing fuel tank. Based on this information, it is likely that the pilot overestimated the fuel quantity onboard the airplane, and had based that estimate on fuel quantity gauge indications that may have been inaccurate. This subsequently resulted in fuel exhaustion and the total loss of engine power.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate fuel management, 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 ERA23LA208
- Event ID
- 20230426107146
- Case number
- ERA23LA208
- 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 2023-04-26.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 4c8f350db9b7c80053b530b172e93318d80b61795e9263b41a9d863c58f1bcbb; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:32:51.546Z.