NYC97FA043 · Cessna 150L
Cessna 150L · Accident: loss of engine power during initial climb
From Perkiomen Valley Airport (N10) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC97FA043
- 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 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
- N10809
- Operator
- John A. Mignone · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Perkiomen Valley Airport (N10)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
- Initial climb
- 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 engine power
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Stall/mush
- 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) › Airspeed, not maintained
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and the 50-hour student pilot were departing on a training flight. After takeoff, the airplane was observed in a steep climb attitude. This was followed by the left wing dropping and a nose-down descent until ground impact. One witness heard a sputtering engine on takeoff. A second witness heard a reduction in power and a few seconds afterwards the sound of the impact. Examination of the aircraft did not disclose evidence of mechanical malfunction. A local pilot and another flight instructor reported that they had observed the flight instructor climbing at what they thought were steep climbs during previous flights. A local pilot reported that the winds were 40 degrees to the right of the runway at 15 knots, with gusts to 22 knots.
Probable cause
The loss of engine power for undetermined reasons, and the pilot's failure to maintain adequate airspeed during the forced landing, which resulted in a stall and collision with the ground. A contributing factor was wind gusts.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC97FA043
- Event ID
- 20001208X07344
- Case number
- NYC97FA043
- 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: 1add1b9eec545f5b4a6f0055901ab323d2847982242ba464251b8a633480a9c8; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:03:55.311Z.