ATL98LA095 · Cessna 150M
Cessna 150M · Accident: loss of control in flight during takeoff
From Vero Beach Regional Airport (VRB) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL98LA095
- 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 150M
- 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
- N9363U
- Operator
- Magnus Erlingsson
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Vero Beach Regional Airport (VRB), Vero Beach, FLTo 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
- Takeoff · rejected takeoff
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Aborted takeoff, delayed
- Pilot in command › Airspeed, not obtained/maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, he and his brother were practicing touch and go landings at Vero Beach Airport. On the second touch and go, he added full power, turned carburetor heat off, and retracted the flaps. The airplane rotated and climbed to approximately 10-20 feet before it started to sink back to the runway. The airplane hit the runway and bounced back into the air three or four times. The pilot's brother, also a private pilot, then took the controls and attempted to regain control of the airplane on the runway. The airplane bounced one more time, broke off the nose landing gear, and impacted the ground, nosing over. After the airplane came to rest, both pilots exited the airplane unhurt. The pilot stated that they did not have sufficient airspeed for the airplane to climb. According to him the normal climb-out speed for a Cessna 150 is 65-70 knots, on takeoff the airspeed indicator was reading between 45 and 55 knots. According to the Cessna 150 flight manual, the flaps up, power off stall speed for a Cessna 150 is 55 miles per hour (48 knots).
Probable cause
The failure of the pilot to obtain flying speed, and the delayed decision to abort the take-off, leading to a loss of control in flight, and the subsequent collision with a ditch.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL98LA095
- Event ID
- 20001211X10473
- Case number
- ATL98LA095
- 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: dc33f520e2da89895febd1e414b0accdc9b967180f8ea76b1ee2d04ff8499831; retrieved 2026-09-22T17:32:17.193Z.