ANC00LA092 · Cessna 150F
Cessna 150F · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Lake Hood Seaplane Base (PALH) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC00LA092
- 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
- N6296R
- Operator
- Craig L. Ketchum · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Hood Seaplane Base (PALH), Anchorage, AKTo 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
- Maneuvering
- 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; 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(cfi) › Supervision, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the first pilot, a flight instructor and owner of the accident airplane, he was providing flight instruction to his daughter in a float-equipped Cessna 150F airplane. He was demonstrating an approach to landing stall about 2,000 feet mean sea level. The airplane was configured with 20 degrees of flaps. When the airplane stalled, the student pilot cross-controlled the airplane. The left wing dropped and the airplane entered an uncommanded, inverted left spin. The instructor was able to recover the airplane to an upright attitude about 300 feet above the ground by adding engine power. The airplane continued to descend in a nose down attitude during the recovery, and struck the ground. The airplane had numerous modifications, including a 160 horsepower engine. The airplane had fixed floats installed, and qualified for the float installation when the previous owner/mechanic designated that the airplane be operated as a Cessna 150G. Changes from wheels to floats resulted in several configuration changes including propellers, and propeller spacers, larger wheels and tires, and the use of a heavier than normal nose wheel strut assembly. As a floatplane, the airplane was required to be operated in the normal category, with intentional spins prohibited. No data was available to the pilot about the consequences, or recovery techniques for an inadvertent spin. A center of gravity calculation of the accident flight placed the airplane within weight and balance limits. The presence of an over-the-counter antihistamine, and a prescription anti-depression medication, were found in the pilot's toxicological samples.
Probable cause
The failure of the pilot-in-command (CFI) to adequately supervise the instructional flight. Factors in the accident were an inadvertent spin entry by the student, and the pilot-in-command's failure to utilize adequate altitude for a stall demonstration.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC00LA092
- Event ID
- 20001212X21359
- Case number
- ANC00LA092
- 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: 3a43189c4dffcb425a65dbc9cb9d94af9d07841d80ae3fa6f8c14d914aa23194; retrieved 2026-09-21T10:33:18.208Z.