ERA26LA018 · Cessna 177 B
Cessna 177 B · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Ona Airpark (12V) to Capital City Airport (FFT)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA26LA018
- 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
Cessna 177 B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 177
- 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
- N159RJ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ona Airpark (12V), Milton, WVTo Capital City Airport (FFT), Frankfort, KY
- Aircraft age
- About 52 years (built 1973)
- 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 › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed on the 130 nautical mile cross country flight, with about 14 gallons of aviation fuel, or 7 gallons per side. After departure, the airplane climbed to a cruising altitude of 2,500 ft mean sea level and proceeded normally. About 50 minutes into the flight, the engine began to run rough with a simultaneous decrease in engine rpm, manifold pressure and fuel pressure. The pilot diverted to a nearby airport and attempted to troubleshoot the rough running engine by advancing the throttle, moving the mixture to full rich and activating the auxiliary fuel pump, which provided brief improvement, before fuel pressure continued to decrease. Unable to maintain level flight, the pilot attempted a forced landing in a field. During the approach, the pilot observed powerlines on short final, and the airplane’s left wing clipped a powerline resulting in a loss of control and a hard landing on rough terrain. The airplane came to rest against a fence and sustained substantial damage to the fuselage and left wing. The pilot reported that he manually dipped the fuel tanks before the flight with a calibrated fuel dipstick; however, he was unable to produce the dipstick or confirm the origin of calibration. In addition, he stated that the engine instruments indicated that he had 27 minutes of fuel remaining at the time, the engine roughness occurred. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. The fuel system was intact and undamaged, the engine fuel supply lines were devoid of fuel, and the total fuel recovered from both fuel tanks was 1 quart. Based on the absence of mechanical anomalies, the lack of fuel in the fuel tanks and engine fuel supply lines, the pilot’s inability to provide or substantiate the calibration of the fuel dipstick, and his overreliance on fuel quantity instrumentation, it is likely that pilot departed with an inaccurate assessment of the available fuel, and the resulting loss of engine power was due to fuel exhaustion.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate fuel planning and preflight inspection, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion and a forced landing. Contributing to the accident was the impact with powerlines during final approach.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA26LA018
- Event ID
- 20251016201875
- Case number
- ERA26LA018
- 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 UTC date the NTSB stores; the local time zone is not recorded, so the local date may differ by a day.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 4c89f0ae5a6fb066de3f47a447381f7639c2b0a62347457326511363dd058573; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:29:04.113Z.