GAA17CA306 · Cessna 150 J
Cessna 150 J · Accident: loss of engine power (partial) en route
From Greater Cumberland Regional Airport (CBE) to New Market Airport (8W2)
Event
- NTSB case
- GAA17CA306
- 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 J
- 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
- N60579
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Greater Cumberland Regional Airport (CBE), CUMBERLAND, WVTo New Market Airport (8W2), New Market, VA
- Aircraft age
- About 48 years (built 1969)
- 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
- 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 (partial)
- 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 systems
- 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 flight instructor reported that, during a long cross-country flight, they encountered deteriorating weather conditions, and to remain visual flight rules, he altered course and destination. En route and while approaching a ridge line, he "noticed that [the airplane's] airspeed started to drop toward 65 miles an hour." He added that "[he] thought that maybe [the airplane was] picking up carburetor ice and [he] reached for the carburetor heat and pulled it out."
The student pilot reported that, after the flight instructor stated, "watch your airspeed," he looked at the rpm gauge and noted that it was indicating 1,800 to 1,900 rpm. He added that the flight instructor took over the flight controls and that the airplane then impacted the top of a ridge.
The airplane sustained substantial damage to the right wing.
Atmospheric conditions reported at the time of the accident around the accident site were conducive to serious icing at cruise power. It is likely that carburetor ice accumulated due to the student pilot's failure to apply carburetor heat and the flight instructor's delayed application of carburetor heat, which resulted in a partial loss of engine power.
Probable cause
A partial loss of engine power due to the formation of carburetor icing, which resulted from the student pilot’s failure to apply carburetor heat and the flight instructor’s delayed response in applying carburetor heat while operating in conditions conducive to carburetor icing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record GAA17CA306
- Event ID
- 20170522X83848
- Case number
- GAA17CA306
- 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: 3a26490429b960e8b6c57cc0e44abb0c281a7bf7e40cfc310598c05d2eb8945b; retrieved 2026-09-16T05:18:26.583Z.