The pilot reported that, although the Piper PA-32’s fuel gauge was providing intermittent information, he decided to depart on a night cross-country flight.
During the flight, the engine lost power.
The pilot declared an emergency and selected a road near Big Spring, Texas, to land on. During the landing, the airplane struck power line wires, hit the ground, and came to rest inverted.
The airplane sustained substantial damage to both wings, the engine mounts, the rudder and the horizontal stabilizer.
Examination of the airplane by an FAA safety inspector revealed that the fuel selector was set to the right-wing tank, and there was no usable fuel in the right-wing tank. The left-wing tank contained usable fuel.
Per Title 14 CFR 91.205, no person may operate a powered civil aircraft with a standard category US airworthiness certificate with an inoperative fuel gauge.
Probable cause: The pilot’s failure to manage the airplane’s fuel supply, which resulted in fuel starvation. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s decision to attempt the flight with an inoperative fuel gauge.
NTSB Identification: GAA18CA152
This March 2018 accident report is provided by the National Transportation Safety Board. Published as an educational tool, it is intended to help pilots learn from the misfortunes of others.
Sportys sells the acrylic dipstick. I use it on every flight. To calibrate the stick just start with one empty tank and add 5 gal. at a time while notching the stick each time.It helps to know what your GPH is in case you have a guage that gives you a false reading while in flight.
I’ve been doing and teaching this stuff for about 60 years now, I have had 13 inflight emergencies, three full off-field forced landings, most including fuel problems.
1. FLY THE BLINKING PLANE!!!! Get everything set up in a normal glide, look for where you are going if it continues, and set up for that.
2. SWITCH TANKS! This problem would have never even started had he done this one simple step.
3. Mixture RICH, fuel pump ON.
4. REDUCE THROTTLE. This simple act got me almost 20 miles to an airport, when a problem developed that did not allow full throttle. I only had 2,000 rpm available, but that was enough to dramatically extend the glide. And I was over the Sierra Nevada’s, certainly didn’t want to land there if I could possibly help it.
5. CHECK OIL PRESSURE. If you don’t have any, then you ARE going to land.
6. If nothing works, SET UP FOR THE LANDING. You need time to mentally prepare for that, TAKE IT. Don’t keep fiddling trying to get the engine running again. You don’t need it for a safe landing, you do need your mind working properly.
6. THIS IS A NORMAL LANDING, just maybe not on an airport. Make sure that is your mindset. Entry, downwind, base, final. Set it up exactly as you have for every single landing you have ever made. One difference, DO NOT USE FLAPS until you are SURE you need them. Flaps too early will get you short, with no-where to go. Except down, right there, of course.
7. If the landing spot is not guaranteed to be smooth and firm, make the decision early to leave the gear UP. Especially if you are going to have to make a water landing. No big deal with the gear up, potentially disastrous with the gear DOWN.
8. DO NOT MAKE ANY RADIO CALLS, unless you are just plain bored with everything else. That mike, right now, is by far and away the least important thing in the plane right now. If you have plenty of time, then a radio call MIGHT get you diverted somewhere to an airport. Just remember one thing tho, please. When the mouth is in gear, the brain isn’t. You have far more important things to do right now than to tell the world you have a problem, in which case all them people on the ground will TRY to help, but they aren’t flying that plane. Their input is mostly distraction, not help.
9. Afterwards when you have made the normal landing, and settled down for about 10 seconds, Call your wife, and tell her you are o-k, the plane’s fine, you just have to figger out what you will do to get home.
Fuel exhaustion, is a situation where there is NO more fuel onboard. Unlike fuel starvation, there is nothing to be done abut re-establishing the flow of fuel. This pilot was very lucky to be alive. He must have forgotten the 45 minutes night rule in the AIM. Most of these occurrences lead to an embarrassing force landing or a ditching. This is an egregious offense with the FAA.
As a Cessna trained pilot we used a dip stick on every flight if we did not fill the tanks. I fly a 182 & dip the tanks before every flight.
Part of my pre-flight.
What to do first when the engine quits? Fuel pump on, change fuel tanks. Within 10 seconds power is restored no matter what the fuel gauges show.
Another case of, ” bad decision making”…..eats the big salami….
If there was 22 gallons in each tank, what happened to the normal procedure of changing tanks every 30 minutes. ?
This guy wrecked his aircraft and should have know the fuel burn rate with 250 hrs in it.
The stupid pilot trick was not using the fuel equally in both tanks and running one dry too low to recover.
What happened to the procedure of looking in the tanks and then calculating the aircraft fuel consumption to know your remaining fuel. ?????
Nothing competent about taking off with KNOWN partial or fully inop equipment.
I’m going to split hairs here. The fuel gauge was not INOP, but it was “intermittent”. I’ve run into this problem in a PA32R. It worked on the ground but 30 minutes into the flight my tanks dropped 50%.
Now let’s back up to how this started: In my case we originally departed VFR and weather declined rapidly (and this was not as forecast). So I did a precautionary landing to be able to file on the ground. While on the ground I topped the tanks. Gauges showed full (no problems with the gauges at this point).
About 30 minutes into the now IFR flight, the tanks dropped by 50%. So I touched the panel around the gauges (trying to diagnose this) and they went back to reading full — indicates to me a grounding problem or a connection problem in the panel wiring. So we made a precautionary landing so I could ensure we were not leaking fuel. Now the gauges read correctly (on the ground).
Are they actually INOP in this case? PA32R and PA32 have the same panel setup as I recall. And in our case the A&P found a wiring problem from when things were being checked for the Annual just a month earlier (he didn’t say what it actually was, but it was not a problem with the gauges specifically, but with a panel connection).
Sounds to me that you are a very competent pilot. It has been my experience acft. returning to flight after maintenance should be double checked for the unexpected. In your case this could not be done, but is a good example.
So he knew he had an inoperative fuel gauge yet he didn’t use a dip stick to check what tank had fuel and by how much. This guy is in a hurry to die.
These fuel exhaustion cases always bring up talk of using a dip stick on the tank, Just how many pilots actually have any idea of how to do that and what a given level would translate out to. For that matter how many pilots would even have a dip stick to perform that procedure. I think there is a false presumption that pilots have that skill and are equipped to perform it.
For what it is worth the pipers I have flown (various PA-28 and PA-32 models) have a large metal tab in the filler neck and there is a placard that tells you the tank capacity as well as what amount of fuel is represented by the bottom of the tab. That is about as close to using a dip stick on the tanks that I have ever gotten.
Also I would point out that on the PA-32 (at least the ones I have flown) there are two individual tanks on each wing but only the outboard cell has a filler so both are filled from it. Given that arrangement the fuel level can be out of sight with a good bit still on-board. However the inboard tank has a visual gauge built into it so you know how much fuel is in the tanks even when it is out of sight. So regardless he should have been able to get a decent approximation on the fuel in the tanks