CEN09CA552 · Cessna 150F
Cessna 150F · Accident: aircraft structural failure during landing
From Abilene Municipal Airport (K78) to Abilene Municipal Airport (K78)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN09CA552
- 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 150F
- 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
- N8312G
- Operator
- Estol L. Bathurst · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Abilene Municipal Airport (K78), Abilene, KSTo Abilene Municipal Airport (K78), Abilene, KS
- 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
- Aircraft structural failure
- 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 structures
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot said that while landing the tailwheel-equipped airplane on runway 35 with a north-northeast wind of 8 mph, he failed to lower the right wing into the wind. The wind raised the right wing while he was using left rudder. The airplane swerved to the east and the left wheel broke off. The airplane then nosed down, buckling the firewall. Federal Aviation Administration inspectors who examined the airplane reported the left axle bore a fracture surface consistent with an overload failure.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate crosswind landing technique, resulting in an excessive side load on the left landing gear that led to an overload failure of its axle.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN09CA552
- Event ID
- 20090831X20930
- Case number
- CEN09CA552
- 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: d71085dd73863745378f1ec634d9633fcb5f3a2aa715f67890d7515a850bc494; retrieved 2026-09-15T12:52:23.084Z.