WPR22LA093 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: loss of control on ground during takeoff
From Lake Havasu City Airport (HII) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR22LA093
- 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 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
- N6496L
- Operator
- Mach 6
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Havasu City Airport (HII), Lake Havasu City, AZTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 42 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
- Takeoff
- 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 on ground
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the takeoff roll, after reaching rotation speed, the student pilot pulled back on the yoke but the airplane did not rotate. He verified the flight instruments and tried again, and although the nose pitched up slightly the airplane did not rotate. He released back pressure on the yoke and realized that the airplane had veered to the left of the runway. The airplane departed the runway and collided with a small tree. The flight was the first time the pilot had flown solo, having just received an endorsement from his flight instructor earlier in the day.
Postaccident examination did not reveal any anomalies with the pitch control system, and both the flaps and elevator trim were set appropriately for takeoff. The rudder cables exhibited significant preexisting wear in the area of the aft rudder pulleys, and the left cable had separated in that area. Metallurgical examination determined that about half of the left cable wire strands had failed before the accident due to wear, but the cable was likely still strong enough to operate the rudder. Therefore, the separation of the left rudder cable likely occurred at impact when the nose wheel, which was connected to the rudder cables, struck terrain, and the remaining intact wire strands of the weakened rudder cable failed in overload. Further, it is unlikely that the deteriorated rudder cables contributed to the accident as the pitch control issues described by the pilot did not indicate a rudder control problem.
The extent of wear and the caked and old grease in the pulleys indicated the cables had not been examined or serviced recently, even though the annual inspection was performed 3 months earlier.
Probable cause
The student pilot’s loss of directional control during takeoff.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR22LA093
- Event ID
- 20220209104616
- Case number
- WPR22LA093
- 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: local date, investigation status, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2022-02-08.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 64f37512b35b7f513da4e232309038f7363d4f1c23d27db541bff10761ca1abb; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:56:44.550Z.