CEN11FA240 · Cessna 150D
Cessna 150D · Accident: VFR encounter with IMC en route
From Lake in the Hills Airport (3CK) to Reedsburg Municipal Airport (C35)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN11FA240
- 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
- 2 · 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 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
- N4178U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake in the Hills Airport (3CK), Lake in the Hills, ILTo Reedsburg Municipal Airport (C35), Reedsburg, WI
- 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
- VFR encounter with 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
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 student pilot departed on a 108-nautical-mile cross-country flight. About the time of departure, a weather reporting station near the departure airport reported visual meteorological conditions with few clouds at 8,000 feet above ground level (agl) and 10 miles of visibility. About this time, a weather reporting station near the destination airport was reporting instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) with 4 miles of visibility and an overcast ceiling at 700 feet agl. That station, about 10 miles from the accident site, continued to report IMC through the time of the accident. About 10 minutes after the accident time, the weather consisted of a 700-foot overcast ceiling and 2 1/2 miles of visibility. There was no record that the pilot had obtained a weather briefing prior to the flight.
The radar track of the accident flight was not a straight-line course and contained several course and altitude changes. During the last 15 miles of the flight, the flight path was jagged and culminated in a right turn with the airplane completing about 1 1/2 turns before the end of the data. The last radar position was about 0.57 miles from the accident site and about 1,600 feet agl. The airplane was equipped with gyroscopic instruments, but the pilot had only accumulated 0.5 hours of simulated instrument training when the accident occurred. He did not have an instructor’s endorsement to conduct the cross-country flight and was carrying a passenger, contrary to regulations.
Probable cause
The student pilot’s inadequate preflight planning and his decision to continue the flight into instrument meteorological conditions, which resulted in a subsequent loss of airplane control.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN11FA240
- Event ID
- 20110322X03800
- Case number
- CEN11FA240
- 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: 73bac39fb7ed2c2e635b1512c329e4d2187fa114911ba9153b98ad5928f311d4; retrieved 2026-09-13T21:17:09.162Z.