CEN09CA410 · Cessna 150 G
Cessna 150 G · Accident: fuel exhaustion en route
From Bult Field (C56) to Bloomington, IL
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN09CA410
- 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 150 G
- 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
- N8319J
- Operator
- Craig Dennis Husch
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bult Field (C56), Monee, ILTo Bloomington, 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 · descent
- 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
- Fuel exhaustion
- 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
- Tree(s)
- 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 pilot reported that he checked the fuel level by looking at the fuel gauge prior to departure, and it read about 1/2 tank. Approximately one hour after departure, the pilot was beginning to make a descent to the destination airport. About 3 miles from the airport the engine lost power, and the pilot executed a forced landing to a road. During the approach to the road, the stall warning sounded as he tried to clear some trees. He lowered the nose and flew under the trees, but the left wing hit a tree and the airplane impacted the ground. An inspection of the airplane revealed that there was about 1.5 gallons of fuel remaining in the tanks. The Pilot Operating Handbook states that the unusable fuel capacity of the airplane was 3.5 gallons.
Probable cause
The complete loss of engine power as a result of fuel exhaustion due to the pilot's inadequate preflight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN09CA410
- Event ID
- 20090706X12224
- Case number
- CEN09CA410
- 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. 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: 21763e181fc9fbfcb9f48d5b4b3bc071a479e62b02381be34f34a1237c2c9db4; retrieved 2026-09-15T11:41:03.388Z.