ERA24LA087 · Cessna 150 M
Volunteer Aviation Foundation Cessna 150 M · Accident: fuel related en route
From Tullahoma Regional Airport William Northern Field (THA) to an unrecorded destination
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA087
- 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 150 M
- 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
- N7UT
- Operator
- Volunteer Aviation Foundation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tullahoma Regional Airport William Northern Field (THA), Tullahoma, TNTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 50 years (built 1974)
- 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
- Fuel related
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot was on a solo cross-country flight when the accident occurred. She noticed no irregularities during the preflight inspection, engine run-up, or climb out. About 80 nautical miles (nm) into the flight, while operating at 2,500 ft mean sea level, the engine began to run rough. The pilot moved the throttle and mixture to full, but the engine continued to progressively operate rougher with a subsequent decrease in engine rpm. Unable to maintain altitude, the pilot diverted to the nearest airport. While on final approach, the airplane was high and fast, and she did not believe there was enough altitude to complete a 180° turn to bleed off airspeed, so she continued the approach. The airplane landed long down the runway, exited the paved surface, and collided with a fence resulting in substantial damage to the wings and elevator. Postaccident examination and a test run of the engine did not reveal evidence of any preexisting anomalies or failures that would have prevented normal operation. The recorded temperature and dew point near the accident site were conducive to “serious icing” at cruise engine power settings. The pilot described the troubleshooting tasks she performed while trying to diagnose the reason for the loss of engine power, but did not report using carburetor heat. Based on this information, carburetor ice likely formed during the cruise portion of the flight, which resulted in a partial loss of engine power and a forced landing. During the approach, the pilot was high, fast, and landed long resulting in a runway excursion.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to use carburetor heat in conditions conducive to the formation of carburetor ice, which resulted in a partial loss of engine power due to fuel starvation. Contributing to the outcome was her failure to attain a proper touchdown point during the subsequent diversionary landing, which resulted in a runway excursion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA087
- Event ID
- 20240111193639
- Case number
- ERA24LA087
- 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: 1af9fd4e5c3180f9e7d4e96f6463513e05fca328d8fba88bf835889637f57ecd; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:25:49.389Z.