CEN09CA232 · Cessna 150D
Cessna 150D · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Madison Municipal Airport (IMS) to Madison Municipal Airport (IMS)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN09CA232
- 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 150D
- 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
- N5920T
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Madison Municipal Airport (IMS), Madison, INTo Madison Municipal Airport (IMS), Madison, IN
- 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
- 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
- Loss of engine power (total)
- 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 › Aircraft power plant
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During a local pleasure flight the pilot noticed that the engine oil temperature indication was rising. He reduced the throttle, and then smelled something and saw smoke coming from under the instrument panel. He opened the window to alleviate the smoke. About 3 to 4 minutes from the airport, the engine lost power and the pilot performed a forced landing to a golf course. The nose landing gear collapsed during the forced landing, resulting in substantial damage to the airplane's firewall. Examination of the airplane subsequent to the accident revealed that the aft portion of the muffler was separated from the assembly allowing hot exhaust gasses to enter the engine compartment. The magneto P-lead wire was melted and shorted to the airplane structure.
Probable cause
The loss of engine power due to the failure of the engine's muffler which melted and grounded the ignition P-lead wire.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN09CA232
- Event ID
- 20090401X92123
- Case number
- CEN09CA232
- 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: 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: 7afcc10e1efd0c03bed6b775fce0b31bee0c185d8baca5fe080b37728790da1b; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:53:46.326Z.