NYC07FA173 · Cessna 150L
Cessna 150L · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From Chautauqua County-Jamestown Airport (JHW) to Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport (ITH)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC07FA173
- 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
- 1 · 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna 150L
- 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
- N10958
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chautauqua County-Jamestown Airport (JHW), Jamestown, NYTo Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport (ITH), Ithaca, NY
- 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
- 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
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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 control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, 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 non-instrument rated pilot had accumulated 99 total hours of flight experience, with 50 of those hours having been logged 13 years prior to the accident. The pilot logged 3.2 total hours of flight experience at night, and his private pilot certificate was issued with a limitation prohibiting night flight. The accident flight was a 528 nautical mile cross-country trip, which began about 2000. The pilot departed from his first and second intended fuel stops at 2340 and 0300, respectively. An airmen's meteorological information (AIRMET) issued at 2245 warned of instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) and mountain obscuration along the latter segment of the intended route of flight. IMC was consistently reported at the planned final destination from the time of the initial departure until the accident. Witnesses reported that mist, rain, and darkness prevailed at the accident site at the time of the accident. Review of information extracted from a handheld global positioning system unit recovered from the wreckage revealed that the pilot entered a left 360-degree turn, followed by a descending right 360-degree turn, which continued until the airplane impacted terrain. The final flight path was consistent with an entry into IMC, and the subsequent loss of control due to spatial disorientation.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate in flight decision and failure to maintain aircraft control during cruise flight. Contributing to the accident were inadequate preflight planning, dark night and poor weather conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC07FA173
- Event ID
- 20070806X01113
- Case number
- NYC07FA173
- 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: 8c3e588a975a97e334476ecc5ea62045a1336bca91aedec8c80c082d5e81af15; retrieved 2026-09-20T16:26:30.038Z.