Wow, running out of fuel...how awful. Why in the world wouldn’t a pilot stop a couple hundred miles sooner to top off? The stakes are so high.
Pilots are supposed to do fuel calculations for every trip along with weight and balance.
A lot of pilots get lazy and don’t do it. Or they could make a simple math mistake.
At the airport my son and I fly out of, I69, a guy rented a Cessna 172 from Sporty’s Pilot Shop the other day. Loaded it with fuel and three buddies.
Never made it off the runway. Ran it off into a ditch at the end. He was 500 lbs overweight from the 980 max load. Just stupid. At least no one died in that one.
I knew a fairly new pilot who ran out of gas and ended up in a lake. Fortunately he survived. When I penciled out the numbers afterwards, it was pretty clear that his error was that he didn’t calculate in a very strong headwind. If the air had been calm, he would have had plenty of fuel.
“Fuel mismanagement “is the most common cause of private plane crashes. The second is flying into weather conditions the pilot is not trained for ( think JFK jr.)