WPR24LA294 · Luscombe 8 A
Luscombe 8 A · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Lewiston Nez Perce County Airport (LWS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR24LA294
- 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
Luscombe 8 A
- Aircraft type
- Luscombe 8
- 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
- N71899
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lewiston Nez Perce County Airport (LWS), Lewiston, IDTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 78 years (built 1946)
- 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 › Aircraft power plant
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
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 reported that he departed with full fuel tanks, which should have provided about 3.5 hours of endurance. While enroute, the pilot noted the fuel levels in the two fuel tanks were uneven and were draining faster than expected and that the left fuel gauge appeared lower than the right gauge. The pilot had difficulty monitoring the airplane’s fuel levels because he perceived the fuel gauges to be inaccurate and the needles were bouncing. As the airplane approached the destination airport at the conclusion of the 2.5 hour flight, the engine suffered a total loss of power. The pilot performed a forced landing in a field, during which the airplane impacted a fence and came to rest inverted. As a result, the airplane sustained substantial damage to the fuselage and empennage. Postaccident photos revealed the lower cabin insulation was fuel soaked, and fuel staining was observed beneath the left fuel valve. The pilot reported that both fuel tanks were devoid of fuel after he impacted the ground. When fuel was fed into the airplane’s left fuel line after the accident, the left fuel valve began to leak from around the valve shaft.
Figure 1: The left fuel valve and fuel system diagram.
Based on the available information it is likely that the airplane lost an unknown quantity of fuel due to a leak in the left fuel valve, which resulted in fuel exhaustion and a total loss of engine power.
Probable cause
A failure of the left fuel valve, which resulted in fuel exhaustion and a total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR24LA294
- Event ID
- 20240904195054
- Case number
- WPR24LA294
- 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, 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: c3d8e2d1e9e1e624844f8569f03d3a4f98865f3e55026cc667e80854f501131e; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:13:53.682Z.