WPR23LA303 · Aldinger Albert John COZY Mark III
Aldinger Albert John COZY Mark III · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Sanderson Field (SHN) to Battle Mountain Airport (BAM)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR23LA303
- 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
Aldinger Albert John COZY Mark III
- Aircraft type
- Aldinger Albert John COZY MARK
- 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
- N964AL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sanderson Field (SHN), Shelton, WATo Battle Mountain Airport (BAM), Battle Mountain, NV
- Aircraft age
- About 27 years (built 1996)
- 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
According to the pilot, he had recently purchased the airplane and was in the process of relocating it to his home airport. During the flight, he had no way to monitor the fuel burn during the flight other than the fuel sight gauges, which he could not see due to objects blocking his view. While the pilot was not able to monitor the fuel burn during the flight, he did lean the fuel and routinely switched fuel tanks; he believed he had plenty of fuel for the flight. After flying for about 2 hours and 20 minutes, the airplane sustained a complete loss of engine power. Unable to maintain altitude, he conducted an off-airport landing to a dirt road. During the landing roll, the airplane encountered uneven terrain, nosed over, and came to rest inverted.
A visual inspection of the fuel system was conducted, and continuity was established from the main fuel tanks throughout the system; however, there was no fuel observed. A functional engine test was conducted, and a ground run was performed at various power settings uneventfully for about 5 minutes.
Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed no evidence of preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. The total amount of fuel onboard the airplane before the flight could not be determined; however, given the lack of fuel found in the tanks after the accident and no indications of engine anomalies, it is likely that the loss of engine power was due to fuel exhaustion.
Probable cause
The pilot'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 WPR23LA303
- Event ID
- 20230807192813
- Case number
- WPR23LA303
- 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: 82fe7a7ac1e48b39d16fad87b942bb6c5e70800369b2cd36c2d30016233e76c7; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:58:21.444Z.