WPR25LA096 · Cessna 150J
Cessna 150J · Accident: part(s) separation from aircraft en route
From Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC) to West Desert Airpark (UT9)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR25LA096
- 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 150J
- 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
- N151GW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC), Cedar City, UTTo West Desert Airpark (UT9), Fairfield, UT
- Aircraft age
- About 56 years (built 1969)
- 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 · cruise
- 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
- Part(s) separation from aircraft
- 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 propeller/rotor
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, who had recently purchased the airplane, he inspected the airplane’s propeller for damage before departing on a multi-leg cross country flight. During the second leg of the flight, one of the propeller blades separated about 17 inches from the hub. The pilot shut down the engine and was able to perform a forced landing on a rural road. The airplane sustained substantial damage to its airframe and engine mount from excessive vibrations caused by the propeller blade separation. The maintenance records for the airplane and propeller were incomplete, and the propeller’s maintenance and operational history could not be determined. Examination of the propeller revealed fracture features consistent with a fatigue crack that initiated from an impact pit on the blade face. The impact pit was one of several areas of damage consistent with debris impacts that were subsequently painted over and obscured with black paint. Measurement of the pit at the origin of the fatigue crack revealed it was within tolerance for a field repair; however, there was no indication any repair was performed. There was insufficient information to determine when the damage occurred or how long the fatigue crack had been present.
Probable cause
The failure of the propeller blade due to fatigue that originated from an impact pit sustained at an unknown time. Contributing to the accident was the failure of unknown maintenance personnel to detect and repair the impact pit before painting the propeller, which obscured the damage.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR25LA096
- Event ID
- 20250218199722
- Case number
- WPR25LA096
- 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: de914251ab137d16567eb4f7c8e57560150297e1aaaf334c1d2c3cf7181bacd5; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:40:32.124Z.