CEN21LA188 · Cessna 150M
Cessna 150M · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN21LA188
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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 150M
- 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
- N439WT
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 45 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
- 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
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported he was taking off on personal flight when a gust of wind lifted the airplane’s wing, and the airplane became airborne during his corrective control input. The pilot continued the climbout and attempted to gain airspeed, but the airplane did not accelerate and seemed to slow. The pilot elected to land the airplane to avoid trees that were ahead of him. The airplane touched down on a grass area just beyond the end of the runway but impacted in a drainage ditch about 100 ft. beyond the departure end of the runway that collapsed the nose landing gear. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the engine mounts at the nose landing gear. A Federal Aviation Administration inspector reported that there were no preaccident mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operations and that the engine was making power at impact. At the time of the accident, the pilot was taking off on runway 35 with a quartering wind from the northwest. The pilot reported that he may have encountered wind shear over the treetops which might have kept him low and slow to accelerate.
Probable cause
The pilot’s decision to abort the takeoff on encountering a wind gust and his landing beyond the end of the runway that resulted in the airplane impacting a ditch collapsing the nose landing gear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN21LA188
- Event ID
- 20210414102908
- Case number
- CEN21LA188
- 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, cause areas. 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: 36a65cad6b000d4a3386b01e56d1b142ad3088ba29f0266747099648b6a7d5f3; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:56:44.874Z.