ERA11LA203 · Cessna 150H
Cessna 150H · Accident: landing area overshoot
From Arnold Field (M31) to Arnold Field (M31)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA11LA203
- 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 150H
- 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
- N6555S
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Arnold Field (M31), Halls, TNTo Arnold Field (M31), Halls, TN
- 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
- 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
- Landing area overshoot
- 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
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 flight at 500 feet above ground level and about 10 miles from the departure airport, the pilot reported hearing a "pop" sound from the rear of the airplane. Concerned about whether further flight was safe, the pilot elected to perform an off-airport precautionary landing. After reducing engine power, the pilot attempted to "slip" the airplane and noted that the left rudder pedal would not move and that he could not slip the airplane to the left. The airplane subsequently approached the field higher and faster than the pilot intended and overran the intended landing area. Before coming to rest, the nose landing gear collapsed forward, resulting in substantial damage to the firewall. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the nose landing gear steering linkage was pulled taut, which restricted movement of the left rudder pedal. The taut nose landing gear steering linkage was likely the result of the accident sequence. After disconnecting the steering linkage, the rudder operated normally in both directions with no other flight control anomalies noted.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to attain the proper glidepath during on off-airport landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA11LA203
- Event ID
- 20110322X31313
- Case number
- ERA11LA203
- 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: b2de50a28445e0456e40bd5d156bfe1ad730eb827a72f5c994b9627de653f4db; retrieved 2026-09-15T15:57:23.398Z.