Accident Details
A 90-hour private pilot was contacted by a maintenance facility to ferry an airplane that had been painted prior to delivery to its new owner. The pilot reported flying on the right fuel tank for the first 30 minutes, then switching the fuel selector every hour thereafter. To operate the selector, she had to move her left leg and visually confirm the position because she could not feel the detent. About 10 minutes after leveling off at 3,000 feet, and while 25 nautical miles from the next refueling stop, the engine began running rough and then lost all power. The airplane was too low to reach the intended field and collided with mature trees just short of it.
Post-Accident Examination
The engine was removed from the airframe, fitted with a test propeller, and successfully run to 2,400 RPM, indicating no internal failure. Examination of the fuel system revealed that the fuel selector placard (Piper P/N 63832) was correct for the airplane, but the selector pointer (handle) was incorrect. The installed pointer was designed for later model airplanes (serial numbers 28-7105001 and up) and had a different indexing of the fuel valve shaft compared to the correct pointer (Piper P/N 63949). As a result, the pointer would not align properly with the placard. An unknown installer had re-drilled the placard holes and rotated it approximately 45 degrees so that the pointer would align with both the placard and the valve detents.
Fuel Selector Mismatch
The mismatched pointer and modified placard likely led to the pilot unknowingly selecting a position that did not correspond to a fuel tank, causing fuel starvation and subsequent engine power loss.