NTSB CAROL · Event
Event CEN25LA239
Registry · N71790
FAA Aircraft Registry record.
Make / Model
LUSCOMBE 8A
Engine
CONT MOTOR A&C65 SERIES (65 hp)
Seats / Engines
2 seats · 1 engine
Last airworthiness date
19560527
ADS-B equipped
Yes — Mode-S A999BA
Registrant of record
CHRISTY RONALD P
Source: FAA Aircraft Registry (releasable master file).
Aircraft involved
Probable cause & findings
The pilot’s inadequate fuel planning and his failure to adequately monitor the fuel level during the flight which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Factual narrative
The pilot was conducting a personal flight when about an hour into the flight he realized that the airplane was low on fuel. The pilot decided to divert to a nearby airport where he intended to refuel. However, about 8 miles from the airport the airplane had a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion and the pilot made a forced landing to a grass field. The vertical stabilizer and rudder sustained substantial damage when the airplane nosed over during the forced landing. The pilot reported that there were no preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation of the airplane. Additionally, the pilot acknowledged that the accident could have been prevented had he identified the airplane’s low fuel level earlier in the flight. Source: NTSB Aviation Accident Database Retrieved: 2026-02-12
NTSB Findings
Hierarchical cause / factor breakdown from the FAA bulk avdata database. Each finding tagged C (Cause) or F (Factor).
- — Aircraft-Fluids/misc hardware-Fluids-Fuel-Fluid level
- — Personnel issues-Task performance-Planning/preparation-Fuel planning-Pilot
- — Personnel issues-Action/decision-Info processing/decision-Identification/recognition-Pilot
- — Personnel issues-Psychological-Attention/monitoring-Monitoring equip/instruments-Pilot
Verbatim from NTSB's published report. Source file
NTSB_2025_CEN25LA239.txt.
Findings + structured fields enriched from FAA avall.mdb.
Full investigation docket on
data.ntsb.gov ↗.
Beyond the agency record
Search this event elsewhere.
Pre-filled searches into the sources where news + community discussion of aviation events lives. External sources are reported, not agency. Treat them as signal that something happened, not as fact about what happened.
Entity-clustered aviation events in the press — last 24 hr + 30-day archive.
Official agency record + docket.
Investigative docket: factual reports, photos, transcripts.
Long-running aviation incident database (Flight Safety Foundation).
Community NTSB synthesis blog — often has photos and witness reports.
Gold-standard aviation incident blog.
Aviation industry news search.
GA pilot forum — informed but rumor-prone.
GA pilot subreddit search.
Tail-number page — flight history (free tier limited).
AOPA Air Safety Institute search.
Mainstream press coverage. Recent events only.
Privacy-preserving news search.
External links open in a new tab. We don't ingest their content; we deep-link search queries.
Related research
What the literature says.
Academic papers and agency reports matching this event's aircraft type or causal vocabulary (fuel exhaustion). Sourced from NASA NTRS, NTSB Safety Studies, FAA CAMI, AOPA Air Safety Institute, Embry-Riddle Scholarly Commons, arXiv, and the Semantic Scholar academic graph.
- Embry-Riddle Scholarly Commons 2020 · Conference paper
Concurrent Sessions: Session 8A - Technology in Aviation
- AOPA Air Safety Institute 2023 · Safety advisor
Safety Advisor: Fuel Awareness
AOPA Air Safety Institute safety advisor on preventing fuel-exhaustion and fuel-starvation accidents in general aviation. Covers pre-flight fuel planning, reserve requirements (14 CFR 91.151, 91.167),…
- arXiv 2020 · arXiv preprint
Continuation Method with the Trusty Time-stepping Scheme for Linearly Constrained Optimization with Noisy Data
The nonlinear optimization problem with linear constraints has many applications in engineering fields such as the visual-inertial navigation and localization of an unmanned aerial vehicle maintaining…
- NASA NTRS 2019 · Abstract
U.S. Civil Rotorcraft Accidents, 1963 through 1997
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has recorded 8,436 rotorcraft accidents during the period mid - 1963 through the end of 1997.
- NASA NTRS 2019 · Contractor Report (CR)
A study of carburetor/induction system icing in general aviation accidents
An assessment of the frequency and severity of carburetor/induction icing in general-aviation accidents was performed. The available literature and accident data from the National Transportation Safet…
- NASA NTRS 2018 · Other
Parachuting to Safety
NASA's Langley Research Center awarded Ballistic Recovery Systems, Inc., three Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts to research and develop a new, low cost, lightweight recovery system …
Browse the full corpus — academia portal ↗