ERA26LA190 · Piper PA-30
Piper PA-30 · Accident: fuel starvation on approach
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA26LA190
- 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
Piper PA-30
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-30
- 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
- N8432Y
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 59 years (built 1967)
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern downwind
- 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 starvation
- 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
The pilot stated that the purpose of the flight in the multiengine airplane was to build proficiency and to take an acquaintance, who was not a pilot, on a familiarization flight. The pilot described that before departing the airplane had 22 gallons of fuel in the main fuel tanks, and 15 gallons of fuel in the auxiliary fuel tanks, and that the entire flight was conducted utilizing the main fuel tanks. The pilot flew over a practice area for 20 minutes and then returned to the departure airport where he performed two uneventful touch-and-go landings. The pilot added that he miscalculated the fuel consumption rate and thought about 15 minutes of fuel remained for the third landing, which would have been full-stop. He further stated that while turning from the downwind to the base leg of the airport traffic pattern for the third landing, both engines lost total power. The pilot turned toward the runway and attempted to restart one of the engines; however, the attempt was unsuccessful and the airplane impacted trees about ½-mile short of the runway. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the fuselage, empennage, and both wings. The pilot added that there were no preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures of the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate preflight and inflight fuel planning, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel starvation and subsequent forced landing into trees.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA26LA190
- Event ID
- 20260427202894
- Case number
- ERA26LA190
- 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: 261835a8ac8f84772f0f814065c1265c75507e8ff3be393b48e055aded3bc7a1; retrieved 2026-09-16T21:20:12.155Z.