ERA23LA336 · Cessna 182P
Cessna 182P · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Gastonia Municipal Airport (AKH) to Grand Strand Airport (CRE)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA23LA336
- 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 182P
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N22RE
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gastonia Municipal Airport (AKH), Gastonia, NCTo Grand Strand Airport (CRE), North Myrtle Beach, SC
- Aircraft age
- About 49 years (built 1974)
- 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 · descent
- 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 › Aircraft systems
- 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 pilot stated that he visually confirmed there were 52 gallons of fuel onboard and that both fuel caps were secure to their respective fuel port during his preflight inspection of the airplane. The pilot then departed on the approximate 1 hour and 15-minute flight. While en route, the “low fuel light” flickered on and off. The pilot noted the fuel gauge was reading half full, and he continued with the flight. When the airplane was about 8 minutes from the destination airport, and after descending to traffic pattern altitude, the engine stopped producing power. The pilot was unable to restart the engine and made a forced landing to a highway. The airplane impacted a jersey barrier during the landing, which resulted in substantial damage to the airframe. Federal Aviation Administration inspectors examined the airplane accident site and observed that the left wing fuel cap was missing and blue fuel stains were evident on the wing aft of the fuel cap that extended to the trailing edge of the flap. Recovery personnel also reported that both fuel tanks were empty when the wings were removed for transport. The missing fuel cap was not located. Based on this information, it is likely that the pilot did not properly secure the left fuel cap during the preflight inspection, and that during the flight it separated from the airplane. The remaining fuel was siphoned from the fuel tanks through the open fuel port, resulting in fuel exhaustion, and the total loss of engine power.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to properly secure the left wing fuel cap, which resulted in a loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA23LA336
- Event ID
- 20230814192862
- Case number
- ERA23LA336
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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: a334444fd5ae71db85bbdb2e38dced6a1c0b272503b82a19eb756d84d662d6f1; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:59:47.970Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: destination. Wrong state; CRE is Grand Strand Airport at North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the recorded accident location.