CEN23LA214 · Progressive Aerodyne Inc SEAREY LSA
Progressive Aerodyne Inc SEAREY LSA · Accident: fuel exhaustion on approach
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN23LA214
- 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
Progressive Aerodyne Inc SEAREY LSA
- Aircraft type
- Progressive Aerodyne SEAREY
- 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
- N316SR
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 7 years (built 2016)
- 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 airplane was returning to the departure airport after a local training flight when the engine lost all power. Restart attempts were not successful. The pilot reported that he glanced at the fuel gauge and it indicated ¼ full. During the forced landing the airplane contacted trees, which resulted in substantial damage to the left wing. Examination of the airplane after the accident revealed that only a trace amount of fuel was visible in the semi-transparent plastic fuel tank; the tank did not appear to be breached. After the airplane was removed from the accident site and leveled on a trailer used for recovery, the fuel gauge read empty. A subsequent engine run was performed where fuel was added to the tank and the engine started. The engine was operated from idle to full throttle and no anomalies were detected during the engine run. Based on the pilot’s report, the flight duration was about 2.5 hours; however, recorded flight track data indicated the flight actually lasted 3 hours. Available information indicates the flight crew failed to assure there was an adequate fuel supply for the flight, which resulted in fuel exhaustion and a complete loss of engine power.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion that resulted from the pilots’ inadequate preflight planning.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN23LA214
- Event ID
- 20230601192282
- Case number
- CEN23LA214
- 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, coordinates, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2023-06-01.
- API snapshot SHA-256: eda271d99778292b1e7fb5bf623e34da0f1d46c441f220483408dd359512d76d; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:40:20.619Z.