ATL00LA005 · Cessna 150F
Cessna 150F · Accident: partial loss of engine power (mechanical failure) during initial climb
From Thigpen Field (00M) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL00LA005
- 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 150F
- 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
- N6444F
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Thigpen Field (00M), MSTo 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
- Partial loss of engine power (mechanical failure)
- 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 › Airspeed, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot took off from runway 16 and the engine lost partial engine power on initial climb. The pilot decided to return to the airport and stalled the airplane during the turn. The airplane subsequently collided with trees and then the ground off the departure end of the runway. Examination of the wreckage revealed that the airplane collided with the ground in a nose-low attitude. The airplane was destroyed. A post-accident teardown examination of the engine revealed that an exhaust valve was stuck in the open position.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain flying speed that resulted in a loss of control and stall. A factor was a stuck exhaust valve.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL00LA005
- Event ID
- 20001212X19907
- Case number
- ATL00LA005
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- 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: d042417b34a4118a02c1839472ad5699aee2a81eb9be9a2f2ccde35e4aad85f3; retrieved 2026-09-21T20:21:29.468Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: damage. The narrative states "The airplane was destroyed."