CEN15LA109 · Cessna 182R
Cessna 182R · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From Santa Fe Municipal Airport (SAF) to Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN15LA109
- 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 182R
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N9611H
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Santa Fe Municipal Airport (SAF), Santa Fe, NMTo Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC), Cedar City, UT
- Aircraft age
- About 34 years (built 1981)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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 control in flight
- 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 as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot was conducting a personal cross-country flight. The pilot reported that, during takeoff with 0 flaps, he accelerated the airplane to about 60 knots and that it subsequently lifted off. About 50 to 100 ft above ground level, the airplane entered an uncommanded steep left bank; the pilot used aileron and rudder inputs and briefly regained control of the airplane before it again banked hard left, pitched down, and impacted terrain. The airplane came to rest upright about 500 ft left of the runway and about 3,000 ft from the beginning of the takeoff roll. The uncommanded bank and pitch down is indicative of an aerodynamic stall.
A witness at the airport reported that all of the aircraft, which included the accident airplane, that had been parked overnight on the ramp had frost or ice on them. He added that, before departure, the pilot did not remove any of the frost or ice from the airplane's wings, tail, or fuselage. Photographs of the airplane taken about 45 minutes after the accident showed 1/8- to 1/4-inch-thick rough, mixed rime ice adhering to the wing. The pilot's failure to remove the ice from the airplane's surfaces before departure degraded its takeoff performance and prevented it from attaining sufficient speed to remain airborne and resulted in an aerodynamic stall.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to remove ice from the airplane’s surfaces before departure, which resulted in the airplane’s inability to attain sufficient airspeed shortly after takeoff, the subsequent exceedance of the airplane’s critical angle-of-attack, and an aerodynamic stall.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN15LA109
- Event ID
- 20150120X24700
- Case number
- CEN15LA109
- 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: 32e5759a386414483728a7944151cbbace5e4221c1759457c853a4012cf0ea82; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:02:01.795Z.