CHI01LA068 · Cessna 150G
Cessna 150G · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Illinois Valley Regional Airport Walter A Duncan Field (VYS) to Marshall County Airport (C75)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI01LA068
- 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
- Unknown
- 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 150G
- 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
- N6281S
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Illinois Valley Regional Airport Walter A Duncan Field (VYS), Peru, ILTo Marshall County Airport (C75), Lacon, IL
- 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
- En route · cruise
- 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
- Total loss of engine power (non-mechanical)
- 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
- Fuel exhaustion
- 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 › Aircraft preflight, inadequate
- Terrain condition › Snow covered
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane sustained substantial damage during nose over encountered on a forced landing to a snow covered field, following an in-flight loss of engine power. The pilot was uninjured. The pilot stated, "In order to describe the circumstances leading up to this accident in chronological order we have to go back to the ending of my last flight. I have been flying this aircraft for the past nineteen years and the ending of every flight was a stop at the fuel pumps to top up the tanks." The pilot did not state that he looked in the fuel tanks during the airplane's preflight for the accident flight. He stated that he perceived that the fuel gauges indicated full. He said, "They are always full. ... My conclusion - Someone between my last flight and this, someone entered my hanger and removed 76% (17 gals) of the useable fuel from my airplane." The airplane's engine was test run at low power and it ran smoothly. Fuel was put in each tank and the fuel gauges indicated above empty. Fuel was found leaking from around the shaft of the fuel shut off valve.
Probable cause
the pilot's inadequate airplane preflight and the snow covered terrain. A factor was the fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI01LA068
- Event ID
- 20010123X00339
- Case number
- CHI01LA068
- 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: 962db6b3d40fdcd7486c5333849ecdba5303ab866a132091375763823001af35; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:13:36.647Z.