WPR16FA002 · Cessna 152
Upper Limit Aviation Cessna 152 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC) to Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR16FA002
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 152
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 152
- 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
- N6449M
- Operator
- Upper Limit Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC), Cedar City, UTTo Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC), Cedar City, UT
- Aircraft age
- About 35 years (built 1980)
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A company chief pilot was performing a company check flight of a newly hired flight instructor. Data recovered from an on-board flight tracking system indicated that the airplane was maneuvering about 3,000 ft above ground level in the accident area; the final 35 seconds of data showed a near vertical descent toward the accident location. A witness saw the airplane descending vertically in a slight nose-down attitude "like a fluttering leaf." The airplane impacted the ground in a slightly nose-down and wings-level attitude, and ground impact marks around the airplane did not indicate any forward momentum. Examination of the airframe and engine found no abnormalities that would have precluded normal operation. The flight tracking data, the witness description, and the damage to the airplane are consistent with the airplane entering an aerodynamic stall and descending to ground impact. It could not be determined whether the stall was inadvertent or intentional (stall demonstration). Weight and balance calculations indicated that the airplane was about 40 pounds over maximum gross weight at takeoff and about 10 pounds over gross weight at the time of the accident; however, it is unlikely that this weight exceedance contributed to the loss of control.
Probable cause
The failure of the pilots to maintain control of the airplane while maneuvering, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall from which they did not recover.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR16FA002
- Event ID
- 20151005X93607
- Case number
- WPR16FA002
- 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: f4f3295a74e07be972c753a9e7583388774c7d6d1762d9687fbf6357220378dd; retrieved 2026-09-14T21:32:05.898Z.