WPR22FA227 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: aerodynamic stall/spin while maneuvering
From Logan-Cache Airport (LGU) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR22FA227
- 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
- N934JH
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Logan-Cache Airport (LGU), Logan, UTTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 44 years (built 1978)
- 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
- Aerodynamic stall/spin
- 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 › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Experience/knowledge
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The accident flight was intended to teach the flight instructor candidate how to enter, recognize, and recover from an aggravated stall wherein the airplane follows a corkscrew path. Before the accident maneuver, automatic dependent surveillance - broadcast (ADS-B) data revealed that several training maneuvers were performed with extraordinary directional changes greater than 180° or rapid descents in altitude. The rapid changes in altitude and recovery were consistent with stall or spin recovery maneuvers. Although there were no witnesses to the accident, surveillance video footage captured the airplane descending rapidly in a developed spin. Postaccident examination of the airframe and engine revealed that the airplane impacted terrain in a 45° nose-down attitude, with no evidence of any preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. The operator’s training guidance stated that the minimum altitude to perform spin training was 9,500 ft mean sea level (msl). According to ADS-B data, the accident maneuver was entered about 9,100 ft msl, and the elevation at the wreckage site was 4,590 ft. According to the operator’s flight experience logs, the flight instructor accumulated 2 hours of flight experience learning how to spin the accident airplane. The fight instructors personal flight logs were not provided, and his total flight experience was not determined. According to the operator’s flight experience logs, the flight instructor candidate had no actual flight experience in the accident airplane make and model. The pilot under instruction's toxicology testing detected codeine and morphine in urine at low levels. These results could be explained by codeine use alone, although other potential explanations exist. Regardless, the pilot under instruction had no detectable codeine or morphine in his blood, which makes it unlikely that codeine or morphine effects contributed to the accident.
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s failure to recover from a developed spin, which resulted in impact with terrain. Contributing to the accident was the flight instructor’s decision to enter the maneuver below the operator’s altitude limitation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR22FA227
- Event ID
- 20220624105346
- Case number
- WPR22FA227
- 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, coordinates, 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: ce316a7a1f2e7f7c667e44cbfc37f85c346eb96915d964d5c65a1d334fa0a10c; retrieved 2026-09-15T07:46:24.967Z.