LAX00LA044 · Cessna 152
The Global Group Cessna 152 · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From an unrecorded airport to Glendale Municipal Airport (GEU)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX00LA044
- 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 152
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 152
- 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
- N48WT
- Operator
- The Global Group
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Glendale Municipal Airport (GEU), Glendale, AZ
- 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 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/mush
- 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, not obtained/maintained
- Pilot in command › Stall/mush, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot is chief pilot for a flight school, and reported that a renter pilot had made an emergency landing in a cow pasture in the accident airplane after running out of fuel. The airplane sat in the field unattended over the weekend. The pilot and one of the school's mechanics assessed the damage; none was found. The pilot planned to transport the airplane back to the airport. He put in fuel and performed a preflight and control check with no noted discrepancies. The pilot and the mechanic then moved the airplane to a rough dirt road; the pilot measured the available takeoff distance about 1,500 feet. He reported that the takeoff and initial climb out seemed normal, but the airplane then started turning left. The pilot applied right rudder and aileron but was not able to stop the turn. His airspeed was in the 50-knot range, but about 35 to 40 feet agl, the airplane began to settle while still in an 18- to 20-degree left bank. The stall warning indicator did not activate at any time. The left wing tip impacted the ground, followed by the nose of the airplane. The airplane nosed over and came to rest inverted. The pilot stated that the winds alternated from calm to light and variable at 1 to 2 knots at the time of the accident. A postcrash examination revealed that the flaps, ailerons, and rudders operated normally. No mechanical discrepancies were found with any airframe or engine system.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to attain and maintain an adequate airspeed during takeoff from a short and unimproved dirt road, which resulted in an inadvertent stall/mush condition and impact with the ground.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX00LA044
- Event ID
- 20001212X20126
- Case number
- LAX00LA044
- 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: a6bf8727aedcdf8d66d9c7fe5a0b61bbd5480e82796a1bb689c8fe899bc8ba0c; retrieved 2026-09-22T13:37:02.924Z.