The plane was carrying 17 professional gamblers returning home from Caesar's Palace Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, along with 2 crew members.

The investigation found that the crews were supposed to refill the aircraft with a total of 180 gallons of fuel.

Although the final report concluded that fuel exhaustion was the cause of the crash, it was not received warmly by some relatives of the victims.

[1] The crew initially was supposed to take a flight from Farmingdale, New York to Atlantic City, New Jersey at 09:00 local time.

Ninety gallons of fuel was added to the aircraft, and it departed for Farmingdale at 09:21 local time with 12 passengers on board, under command of Captain Cam Basat.

[2][3] As the flight neared Wilkes-Barre, the crew established contact with the approach controller for clearance, which was granted.

At 11:25, as the aircraft was descending through 3,000', the controller warned that the minimum vectoring altitude (MVA) was 3,300' within the sector.

[2][5][6] The controller also read out the weather condition in the vicinity, and informed the crew about the location of nearby highways, suggesting that they could make an emergency landing.

In response to the crash, the airport fire department was turned into a makeshift encampment for the relatives of the victims.

They had been planned to return after an overnight trip at 1:15 a.m, however due to bad weather the flight had to be postponed until the morning[8].

In 1989, the plane was substantially damaged after it overran a runway and impacted terrain after an aborted take-off.

The NTSB stated that had the flight been filled with sufficient fuel, then the burnt area should have been wider than expected.

Calculations by the NTSB revealed that if the plane were loaded with a total of 2,400 pounds of fuel, then the crew would not have had to refuel in Atlantic City.

[2] The final accident report was published on August 29, 2002, and concluded the cause of the crash was pilot error: "The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the flight crew's failure to ensure an adequate fuel supply for the flight, which led to the stoppage of the right engine due to fuel exhaustion and the intermittent stoppage of the left engine due to fuel starvation.

[2]"Following the release of the final report, relatives of the victims began suing Executive Airlines for negligence.

CEO of Executive Airlines Michael Peragine challenged the NTSB for allegedly overlooking several factors that might have contributed to the accident[1].

However, a lawsuit totalling $32 million USD was eventually settled, which was made public by U.S District Court for Scranton in 2003[12].