ERA22LA363 · Cessna 150H
Cessna 150H · Accident: hard landing
From an unrecorded airport to Shelbyville Municipal Airport (GEZ)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA22LA363
- 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
- 0
- 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 150H
- 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
- N50439
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Shelbyville Municipal Airport (GEZ), Shelbyville, IN
- Aircraft age
- About 54 years (built 1968)
- 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
- Landing
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot-rated passenger, who was accompanied by a commercial pilot, was performing the takeoff at near-maximum gross weight after purchasing the airplane. The pilot-rated passenger took off with 10° of flaps for “extra lift to get us away from the ground.” Both pilots reported that there was high terrain near the airport. The airplane lifted off with about 1,000 ft of runway remaining, climbed to about 100 ft above the runway, and then would no longer climb. The commercial pilot took control of the airplane and looked for a place to land. The stall warning horn sounded, so he lowered the nose to maintain flying airspeed. He maneuvered around some power lines, raised the flaps, and the airplane crashed onto a roadway. It came to rest on an embankment adjacent to the road and was substantially damaged. Postaccident examination of the wreckage, including a test run of the engine, revealed no evidence of a preexisting mechanical malfunction or anomaly. The owner’s manual for the airplane stated that normal and obstacle clearance takeoffs should be performed with flaps up. Use of 10° flaps will shorten the takeoff roll; however, that advantage is lost in the climb to a 50-ft obstacle. The manual further notes that use of 10° flaps should only be used for takeoffs with minimum ground runs or soft/rough fields with no obstacles ahead.
Probable cause
Both pilots’ decision to perform the takeoff near maximum gross weight with 10° of flaps, contrary to the owner’s manual procedure, which resulted in the airplane’s degraded climb performance approaching high terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA22LA363
- Event ID
- 20220808105680
- Case number
- ERA22LA363
- 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: 0086eec891ebc2501db199f4c29956d79350cd6643f64dfd8efe9de17796a19a; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:34:57.071Z.