SEA04LA134 · Cessna 150C
Cessna 150C · Accident: in flight encounter with weather during initial climb
From Lost River Airport (W12) to Arlington Municipal Airport (AWO)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA04LA134
- 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 150C
- 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
- N7815Z
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lost River Airport (W12), Mazama, WATo Arlington Municipal Airport (AWO), Arlington, WA
- 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
- In flight encounter with weather
- 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 › Climb, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Compensation for wind conditions, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot stated that he noted no problems with the airplane during the preflight inspection and the engine runup. After liftoff on runway 29, the airplane climbed to treetop level, at which point a gust of wind pushed the airplane left toward trees bordering the runway. The pilot had to bank the airplane to avoid the trees, and the airplane stopped climbing. After "barely clearing" the trees at the end of the runway, the pilot elected to put the airplane back on the ground as he was concerned the airplane might not clear trees located further ahead. He selected a streambed as an emergency landing site. During the emergency landing, the airplane contacted trees along the edge of the streambed. The pilot reported that the temperature was 88 degrees F and the winds were from 300 degrees at 3 knots. The airport elevation was 2,415 feet, and the density altitude was calculated to be approximately 5,000 feet.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate compensation for the weather conditions and his failure to maintain the initial takeoff climb, which resulted in a collision with trees during an emergency landing. Contributing factors were the unfavorable wind and high density altitude weather conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA04LA134
- Event ID
- 20040806X01161
- Case number
- SEA04LA134
- 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, coordinates. 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: 7104b037eed0c7e6ca053da9352d74c573ab4b9a78d24daadd909912ec9c350b; retrieved 2026-09-21T09:14:33.971Z.