LAX96LA151 · Cessna 150L
American Aero Flying Club Cessna 150L · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Redding Municipal Airport (RDD) to Q96
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96LA151
- 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
- 0 · 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 150L
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 150
- 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
- N5266Q
- Operator
- American Aero Flying Club
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Redding Municipal Airport (RDD), Redding, CATo Q96
- 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
- En route · cruise
- 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
- Total loss of engine power (non-mechanical)
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Fuel system, carburetor › Ice
- Pilot in command › Carburetor heat, not used
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the final leg of a solo cross-country flight, the pilot reported to TRACON controllers that he was losing power and going down. The aircraft landed in a marsh area and nosed over after the landing gear encountered soft mud. The recording hour meter onboard the aircraft showed it had flown 4.6 hours since departing on the multiple stop round robin flight. Fueling records at the midpoint airport disclosed that the aircraft tanks were topped with 9.6 gallons of 100LL fuel. FAA inspectors performed a preliminary examination of the aircraft during the recovery operation and found the fuel system intact. No evidence of a fuel spill was noted under the airplane; however, an odor of fuel was detected from the ground. Just over 3 pints of fuel was drained from the fuel system. An analysis of flight manual performance charts revealed that the aircraft should have had sufficient fuel to complete the trip. Following aircraft recovery, a test run of the engine was conducted utilizing the existing airframe plumbing and electrical systems. The engine started and operated satisfactorily. A detailed examination of the aircraft disclosed no airworthiness discrepancies. The closest official weather observation station to the accident site was 5 miles east; it was reporting a temperature and dew point of 74 and 47 degrees, respectively. According to a carburetor icing probability chart, the temperature/dew point spread fell in a region on the chart annotated 'moderate icing --- cruise power or serious icing --- glide power.'
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to carburetor ice and the student's failure to use carburetor heat. The carburetor icing (weather) condition was a related factor.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96LA151
- Event ID
- 20001208X05441
- Case number
- LAX96LA151
- 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: 14b5cafd0d0302552ed2336f9bc73fe9ea42cf82e80098d8590b8ba67e37160b; retrieved 2026-09-21T12:50:17.733Z.