NASA · Aviation Safety Reporting System
A Piper Archer pilot reported they miscalculated their fuel remaining resulting in a rough running engine due to fuel starvation. They diverted to the nearest suitable airport.
What is ASRS?
The Aviation Safety Reporting System is NASA's voluntary, confidential, non- punitive incident-reporting system, established 1976. Pilots, controllers, dispatchers, and maintenance technicians file reports describing safety- relevant events. NASA de-identifies every report before adding it to the public database. Reports are not investigated by NASA, the FAA, or the NTSB — they represent the reporter's perspective.
Pilot narrative
Verbatim from the de-identified NASA record. First-person account by the
reporter. NASA strips identifying details (names, company, specific time);
anonymization placeholders are ZZZ,
X, Y.
I planned a round trip flight from ZZZ to ZZZ1. I went through all my normal preflight planning procedures, which included obtaining a weather briefing, determining the fuel requirement for the round-trip flight, reviewing the POH and utilizing the Foreflight App. This was my first time flying a Piper Archer. Having used Foreflight for the past three years, I have found that it has very good accuracy when it comes to performance predictions. Therefore I determined that I would be able to make the roundtrip flight with more than 45 minutes of fuel remaining upon arriving back at ZZZ, which more than met the minimum VFR fuel reserve requirement per FAR regulations. Upon arriving in ZZZ1, I visually inspected the fuel tanks, and per my estimation, the fuel remaining in both tanks was more than what I had expected and planned for. On the flight to ZZZ1, my groundspeed was higher than anticipated by around 5 knots which also led me to believe that what I was showing inside of the tanks was higher than what I had planned for. On the flight back to ZZZ, I planned to climb up to 10,500 ft. Upon reaching 10,500 ft. I leaned the mixture to peak EGT. About 2 hours into the flight the engine sputtered and my initial reaction was that there was carburetor icing, so I turned the carb heat on. I then noticed that my fuel gauge was reading about 5 gallons, so I decided to switch to the other fuel tank. At this point, the engine restarted and so I realized I had a fuel starvation issue and I immediately started looking for a place to land. I had ZZZ2 in sight before the engine started sputtering again. Once I knew I could make the runway, I [requested priority handling] with Approach, where they asked me if I had ZZZ2 in sight and how many souls I had on board, to which I replied I did and there were 4 souls on board. They gave me the frequency change to the airport and advised me to call them once on the ground. I landed the aircraft safely with no damage to the aircraft or any injury to any of the passengers. From a human performance standpoint, the main issue was an expectation that the plane was to perform better than it did based on calculations from the operating handbook. To prevent a recurrence of this event, I shouldn't fly a single-engine piston aircraft for more than 3 cumulative hours without fueling up. Having a personal minimum as such can standardize the manner in which I fly older general aviation aircraft that might not be relied upon based on their original performance data.
NASA classification — Anomalies
- Aircraft Equipment Problem
- Inflight Event / Encounter
NASA classification — Assessments
- Contributing Factors / Situations
- Aircraft · Human Factors · Manuals
- Primary Problem
- Aircraft
ASRS reports are voluntarily submitted, de-identified by NASA, and represent the reporter's perspective. The presence of reports on a topic cannot be used to infer prevalence in the National Airspace System. The authoritative source is the NASA ASRS Database Online at asrs.arc.nasa.gov ↗.