ERA24LA269 · Cessna 172 D
Cessna 172 D · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Chatham Municipal Airport (CQX) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA269
- 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 172 D
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N2710U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chatham Municipal Airport (CQX), Chatham, MATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 61 years (built 1963)
- 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 · cruise
- 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
In preparation for a local revenue sightseeing flight with two passengers, the pilot performed a preflight inspection of the airplane and used a generic fuel quantity dipstick that required converting the observed quantity to an actual quantity using a conversion chart. The pilot stated that he inadvertently arrived at an inaccurate quantity; instead of the 12 gallons of fuel he believed was on-board, the airplane likely only had 6 to 7 gallons. About 20 minutes into the scheduled 30-minute flight, the engine lost power completely, and the pilot subsequently performed a forced landing to a nearby beach. During the landing roll the nose landing gear collapsed resulting substantial damage to an engine mount tube. As part of the recovery from the beach, less than 1.5 gallons of fuel were drained from both of the airplane’s intact fuel tanks. A postaccident check of each fuel quantity indicating system revealed each gauge indicated empty with the fuel sending unit fully extended.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate preflight inspection of the airplane’s fuel quantity, which resulted in total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA269
- Event ID
- 20240620194508
- Case number
- ERA24LA269
- 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: c1c6d87a7a6364edccbadc8209b46f920bfaebddb71e730b908c2107ecf60ceb; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:56:38.869Z.