IAD98LA052 · Cessna 150
Cessna 150 · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From 3G3 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD98LA052
- 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 150
- 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
- N21971
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 3G3To 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
- Landing · aborted
- 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
- 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/spin
- 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
- Pilot in command › Airspeed, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot was completing his second supervised solo flight. The airplane touched down half way down the 3,500-foot-long runway, and bounced about 4 to 6 feet in the air. The instructor said that he used a handheld radio to communicate with the pilot and called to the pilot to 'reflare,' but there was no response. He heard the sound of full power being applied. The airplane climbed in a nose high attitude to about 100 feet, banked left, rotated 180 degrees, and nosed into a corn field. The pilot had 21 hours of total flight experience, all in the same make and model as the accident airplane. The pilot said that the accident could have been prevented if he had more training at a small airport, such as the accident airport. Examination of the wreckage by an FAA Inspector revealed the carburetor heat in the cold position, and the flaps set at 40 degrees (full flaps). The examination did not reveal any anomalies that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain adequate airspeed during an aborted landing which resulted in an inadvertent stall/spin.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD98LA052
- Event ID
- 20001211X10104
- Case number
- IAD98LA052
- 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: 13605203e7e39ea2db84ce14f04d934f4a57fac98fbcbe3d9c9f72d373b58861; retrieved 2026-09-21T11:33:28.660Z.