WPR09CA078 · Cessna 150L
Cessna 150L · Accident: nose over/nose down during landing
From Monterey Regional Airport (KMRY) to Half Moon Bay Airport (KHAF)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR09CA078
- 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 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
- N21999
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Monterey Regional Airport (KMRY), Monterey, CATo Half Moon Bay Airport (KHAF), Half Moon Bay, CA
- 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
- Landing · landing roll
- Defining eventThe 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
- Nose over/nose down
- 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
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane left Monterey with the left fuel tank at 5/8 full and the right fuel tank at 1/4 full. After flying 60 miles, the pilot noted that the left fuel gage read zero and the right fuel gauge read 1/8. The remaining 20 miles of the flight was to be over water and rugged coast line. Due to the airplane's low fuel state, the pilot decided to make a precautionary landing into a freshly plowed field. At the end of the landing roll the airplane nosed over.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight fuel planning and preparation. Contributing to the accident was the lack of a suitable area for a forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR09CA078
- Event ID
- 20090111X14619
- Case number
- WPR09CA078
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2009-01-11.
- API snapshot SHA-256: b5c3eefc2c9797fa06ecfff018489b5d057441bc1929a0a5a1cf3bfb0535c51c; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:40:48.585Z.