CHI99FA129 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: loss of control in flight
From Richard I Bong Memorial Airport (SUW) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI99FA129
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 2 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 152
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 152
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N4611B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Richard I Bong Memorial Airport (SUW)To not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Unknown
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Loss of control in flight
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A witness reported, '... the plane was in an extended dive. I could hear the engine running throughout the entire dive...' and that it was, '...at an extremely sharp angle of descent, heading west. The plane continued down long past the time I thought it should have pulled up until finally it reached the tree-top of my vision, disappeared from my view and I heard more of a muffled impact 'thud' than an actual explosive sound.' The airplane impacted the ground inverted in a steep nose down impact angle. The inspection of the airplane revealed no pre-impact anomalies. Student pilots who received flight instruction from the accident CFI reported the CFI would demonstrate spins within the first three flights of instruction. One student pilot reported the CFI had demonstrated a wingover and a spin during his third instructional flight, the first flight with the accident CFI. A witness reported the accident flight was the student pilot's first instructional flight he had received in any aircraft.
Probable cause
the Certified Flight Instructor failed to maintain control of the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI99FA129
- Event ID
- 20001205X00428
- Case number
- CHI99FA129
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 85184dba09f68677733894539dd169f5f6b8535de8663ffa18843b07365ba341; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:09:48.532Z.