Student Pilot Fuel Exhaustion

Davecat

Davecat

Pre-takeoff checklist
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Davecat
Inexcusable. ASU just recently offering an aviation program. Not good for this student's instructor or the head of the department. Starting a night X-ctry taking off after midnight. Seems like flying into the weeeee hours of the morning adds another level of risk that could easily be avoided. This ended well, but could have easily become a tragic event for the student pilot, innocent people on the ground, and the ASU aviation program.

SAN ANGELO, TX – New information Monday confirmed that the airplane that landed at on Knickerbocker Road Monday morning was flown by a student pilot from Angelo State University.
As previously reported, on June 26, 2023 at around 3 a.m., a plane made an emergency landing near the intersection of Knickerbocker and W. Loop 306. For the original story see: San Angelo Police: Plane Makes Emergency Landing on Knickerbocker Rd.

After the San Angelo Police Department made the confirmation of the landing, Angelo State University issued a statement on the incident.

"This morning, a student pilot was participating in a required night time cross country flight. It was determined there was a fuel exhaustion event that resulted in an off-airport landing. No injuries or damages occurred," said ASU's Director of Communications and Marketing Brittany Miller. "A review is in progress with the appropriate entities per standard practice to gather more information."
According to flight aware, the plane took off from Oklahoma City at 12:54 a.m. It appears the plane ran out of fuel at 5,000 ft above FM 2105 north of San Angelo. This is the spot Flight Aware lost the Diamond DV-20 Katana's location.

Angelo State University has offered a flight school for the past few years. This has been the only reported non-airport landing in the program's history.
 
A successful engine-out landing at night though! Could have been much worse.
 
murphey said:
Since when is a solo night XC required for PPL? Or was this for something else?
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Are you assuming he's working on his PPL because the news referred to him as a "student pilot"? Even if he is, he could be doing it at night to cover the commercial requirement.
 
Lindberg said:
Are you assuming he's working on his PPL because the news referred to him as a "student pilot"? Even if he is, he could be doing it at night to cover the commercial requirement.
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That’s why I edited it for the second sentence.
 
Davecat said:
Inexcusable. ASU just recently offering an aviation program. Not good for this student's instructor or the head of the department. Starting a night X-ctry taking off after midnight. Seems like flying into the weeeee hours of the morning adds another level of risk that could easily be avoided. This ended well, but could have easily become a tragic event for the student pilot, innocent people on the ground, and the ASU aviation program.

SAN ANGELO, TX – New information Monday confirmed that the airplane that landed at on Knickerbocker Road Monday morning was flown by a student pilot from Angelo State University.
As previously reported, on June 26, 2023 at around 3 a.m., a plane made an emergency landing near the intersection of Knickerbocker and W. Loop 306. For the original story see: San Angelo Police: Plane Makes Emergency Landing on Knickerbocker Rd.

After the San Angelo Police Department made the confirmation of the landing, Angelo State University issued a statement on the incident.

"This morning, a student pilot was participating in a required night time cross country flight. It was determined there was a fuel exhaustion event that resulted in an off-airport landing. No injuries or damages occurred," said ASU's Director of Communications and Marketing Brittany Miller. "A review is in progress with the appropriate entities per standard practice to gather more information."
According to flight aware, the plane took off from Oklahoma City at 12:54 a.m. It appears the plane ran out of fuel at 5,000 ft above FM 2105 north of San Angelo. This is the spot Flight Aware lost the Diamond DV-20 Katana's location.

Angelo State University has offered a flight school for the past few years. This has been the only reported non-airport landing in the program's history.
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Seems late night flights are a pretty common practice there. There was another XC flight out and back to/from OKC (looks like a touch and go at ABI as well) that arrived an hour behind the accident flight, and yet another an hour after that, arriving back at SJT at 4:30AM.
 
The use of the word inexcusable is inexcusable. You don't know if the flight was delayed because of pop-up thunderstorms, or if the student has a different schedule and flying at midnight is just fine... or what could have been additional factors. Having landed there and usually using the FBO where ASU flies out of, I can say that I have a pretty good opinion of their instruction program and despite the obvious fuel starvation failure, a successful emergency landing at night has to be appreciated.
 
RyanShort1 said:
The use of the word inexcusable is inexcusable. You don't know if the flight was delayed because of pop-up thunderstorms, or if the student has a different schedule and flying at midnight is just fine... or what could have been additional factors. Having landed there and usually using the FBO where ASU flies out of, I can say that I have a pretty good opinion of their instruction program and despite the obvious fuel starvation failure, a successful emergency landing at night has to be appreciated.
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Your kidding, right? Delayed?? Additional factors? Cmon man...thats what is all rolled into what we call AERONAUTICAL DECISION MAKING! What do you know of the ASU program? Its only been in operation for 2 years. Your flight plan is just that, only a plan for guidance. Certainly, if taught correctly, this kid should have been monitoring fuel consumption. You put the plane down instead of trying to stretch the flight out with your fingers crossed. He had plenty of options along that route, KABI sticking out like a sore thumb. Oh, I have flown into Mathis many times. Good FBO's, crazy high fuel prices.
 
I remember one place that had ‘fuel, instrument, & position’ checks every 15 minutes. It may not be that any action was required, the idea was to create the thought pattern. I may just use a similar phraseology now, even if just for the fun of it.

Yes, I know of at least two accidents(Piper) where they never switched tanks, ran the one side dry. Besides the out of balance condition, how could one do that?? In my examples, one a student, other a rated pilot.

If it was ingrained to swing though every 15 minutes(+/-), that low hanging fruit would be picked.
 
I know of an instructor that was flying a students plane back from dropping the student off and the instructor ran it dry. Instructor cant even use being unfamiliar as an excuse as he had the say model.
 
Davecat said:
Your kidding, right? Delayed?? Additional factors? Cmon man...thats what is all rolled into what we call AERONAUTICAL DECISION MAKING! What do you know of the ASU program? Its only been in operation for 2 years. Your flight plan is just that, only a plan for guidance. Certainly, if taught correctly, this kid should have been monitoring fuel consumption. You put the plane down instead of trying to stretch the flight out with your fingers crossed. He had plenty of options along that route, KABI sticking out like a sore thumb. Oh, I have flown into Mathis many times. Good FBO's, crazy high fuel prices.
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No, I'm not kidding. I've delayed a night flight before to wait for a storm system to move where it was obviously OK afterwards, and I have vivid memories of one night cross country that took the student a full hour to prepare to get to the plane and actually get airborne. Things happen. Students also occasionally completely ignore, forget, whatever the things they've been taught and I've seen plenty of that having instructed for a decade including a student who forgot to switch tanks on a Cherokee 180 that we had done all of our training in and it took him something like 2000' to get the plane restarted after he forgot to switch tanks and ran one dry.

ASU's program may only be 2 years old, but it's in partnership with a pre-existing school that picked up the contract and I've had multiple conversations with the folks running it. It's not as new as it sounds. Yeah, the student should have been monitoring fuel consumption, but you show your bias by saying kid, when in fact it could be an older student on a GI bill... will certainly be interesting to see what went wrong, but a safe emergency landing is a good sign.
 
RyanShort1 said:
despite the obvious fuel starvation failure, a successful emergency landing at night has to be appreciated.
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No, it does not have to be appreciated.

What about the guy who took off without doing any preflight and missed the puddle of oil under the engine but was able to land it in a field without killing anyone. Does he get appreciation? How about the pilot who decided to fly through a thunderstorm despite being warned by ATC about thunderstorms ahead and onboard radar? If they make it through successfully do we appreciate their skill as a pilot?

If your poor ADM requires luck and/or skill to save your life and airplane, you get zero appreciation from me.
 
Almost 300nm one way. I'm going to make a WAG that there is far more to the story than has been reported.
 
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"Fuel exhaustion" doesn't ALWAYS mean no fuel left in the tanks, although it IS always a good bet.

It also doesn't necessarily mean that the pilot took off with insufficient fuel. The closest I've ever come to getting killed as a pilot was due to losing fuel through defective gas caps on the C206 after checking fuel with a pipette before departure. You can lose a lot of fuel that way on a two hour flight.
 
dbahn said:
"Fuel exhaustion" doesn't ALWAYS mean no fuel left in the tanks, although it IS always a good bet.

It also doesn't necessarily mean that the pilot took off with insufficient fuel. The closest I've ever come to getting killed as a pilot was due to losing fuel through defective gas caps on the C206 after checking fuel with a pipette before departure. You can lose a lot of fuel that way on a two hour flight.
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That's one of the reasons we believe when our fuel gauges near empty, despite their fabled inaccuracy. Those great engine monitors many have don't account for fuel leaks.
 
dbahn said:
"Fuel exhaustion" doesn't ALWAYS mean no fuel left in the tanks, although it IS always a good bet.

It also doesn't necessarily mean that the pilot took off with insufficient fuel. The closest I've ever come to getting killed as a pilot was due to losing fuel through defective gas caps on the C206 after checking fuel with a pipette before departure. You can lose a lot of fuel that way on a two hour flight.
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I've seen too often where pilots check the fuel during preflight, but then don't even look at the fuel gauges during flight until pre-landing. The argument that fuel gauges are not accurate is not a sufficient justification for not periodically verifying the indicated level. I teach students to do a prelanding drill during cruise - no, it does not mean you put the gear down and flaps down, it just means you verify that all the items you normally check for during a prelanding are in their right positions.
 
RyanShort1 said:
but you show your bias by saying kid, when in fact it could be an older student on a GI bill... will certainly be interesting to see what went wrong, but a safe emergency landing is a good sign.
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What in the world does that have to do with anything. My bias? Typical....changing the focus on what actually happened to my bias. Kid is used as a euphemism instead of using the correct term....unaware young adult, a flying blind student pilot. Donjohnston's post above sums it up very nicely. This Person, be it a kid or someone on a GI bill drew the lucky straw this time. How would you be responding if this happened during daylight hours and Knickerbocker Rd was full of traffic and people were injured? Delays? Okay, I have waited out storms, but at some point good ADM should come into play and scrubbing the flight altogether should be a consideration. No doubt, this pilot was feeling get-there-itis as the plane is likely on a tight schedule at the school. Me thinks flying between midnight and 4am is not good ADM for a student pilot solo.

On an aside. Congrats to the ASU Ram baseball team. Division II World Series Champions!
 
I have a disproportionate amount of night flying time, and the majority of that was well after midnight. I never knew that I suffered from poor ADM. Is there a medication for that? Who do I talk to, my PCM? Flight Doc? Shrink?
 
Davecat said:
How would you be responding if this happened during daylight hours and Knickerbocker Rd was full of traffic and people were injured? Delays? Okay, I have waited out storms, but at some point good ADM should come into play and scrubbing the flight altogether should be a consideration. No doubt, this pilot was feeling get-there-itis as the plane is likely on a tight schedule at the school. Me thinks flying between midnight and 4am is not good ADM for a student pilot solo.
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Where do I go to become as good as you at determining motives and causation?
 
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