ERA24LA367 · Redfield Thomas C RV-6A
Redfield Thomas C RV-6A · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Porter County Municipal Airport (VPZ) to Richmond Executive-Chesterfield County Airport (FCI)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA367
- 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
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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
Redfield Thomas C RV-6A
- Aircraft type
- Redfield Thomas RV-6
- 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
- N136TR
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Porter County Municipal Airport (VPZ), Valparaiso, INTo Richmond Executive-Chesterfield County Airport (FCI), Richmond, VA
- Aircraft age
- About 24 years (built 2000)
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that before departing for the 508 nautical mile cross-country flight, he had a total of 38 gallons of fuel onboard. After departing his home airport, the pilot climbed the airplane to 11,000 ft mean sea level (msl) and was flying “[visual flight rules] on top.” While at 11,000 ft msl, the pilot requested radar vectors around some weather from air traffic control (ATC), during which time, the pilot noticed that his fuel consumption was much higher than he had anticipated. The pilot asked ATC for radar vectors to the nearest airport. The pilot described that the airplane “ran out of fuel” about 7 miles from the diversion airport. The pilot performed a forced landing in a field, resulting in substantial damage to the airplane’s fuselage and wings. A postaccident examination of the wreckage by a Federal Aviation Administration inspector revealed that both wing fuel tanks were absent of fuel and there was no evidence of a fuel leak. After the airplane was recovered, the airframe and engine’s fuel systems were examined in detail and there was no evidence of any preimpact anomalies or failures that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilots’ improper in-flight fuel management, 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 ERA24LA367
- Event ID
- 20240905195060
- Case number
- ERA24LA367
- 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, 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: 3a7c112426ecc049a35dc72f78569d2b27c60779e7a441767e46de0f67aaa2fe; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:14:06.068Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: departure. Typo in city name; airport code VPZ is Porter County Regional Airport, Valparaiso, IN.