ERA16LA300 · Cessna 150 M
Aptis Aviation Cessna 150 M · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Sanford Seacoast Regional Airport (SFM) to Minute Man Air Field (6B6)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA16LA300
- 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 150 M
- 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
- N9230U
- Operator
- Aptis Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sanford Seacoast Regional Airport (SFM), Sanford, METo Minute Man Air Field (6B6), Stow, MA
- Aircraft age
- About 40 years (built 1976)
- 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
- Loss of engine power (total)
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot was conducting a solo cross-country flight and filled the airplane's fuel tanks before departing on the first leg of the flight. While descending from 4,500 ft mean sea level approaching the destination airport, engine power decreased from 2,500 to 1,300 rpm. The student advanced the mixture to full rich and applied carburetor heat; however, there was no change in engine performance. Soon after, the engine experienced a total loss of power and the student performed a forced landing to a field.
About 10 gallons of fuel were drained from the airplane during recovery. Examination of the airframe and engine did not reveal any evidence of preaccident mechanical malfunction or abnormalities. A review of a carburetor icing chart revealed that the atmospheric conditions at the time of the accident were conducive to icing at glide and cruise power; however, since engine performance did not improve after the application of carburetor heat, it is unlikely that the loss of engine power was the result of carburetor ice.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power during descent for reasons that could not be determined because postaccident examination of the airframe and engine revealed no anomalies that would have precluded normal operation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA16LA300
- Event ID
- 20160829X91320
- Case number
- ERA16LA300
- 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: 83f5f5b9a3c9b7a72f6ae3428acfa17d88e5dbc49c4d95504716cb00cff15651; retrieved 2026-09-16T04:12:28.688Z.