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LAX99LA082 · Cessna 172L

25 Jan 1999 · Santa Paula, CA, United States

Cessna 172L · Accident: overrun during landing

From Oxnard Airport (OXR) to Santa Paula Airport (SZP)

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Event

NTSB case
LAX99LA082
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 172L

Aircraft type
Cessna 172
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
N7639G
Operator
Unknown
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Oxnard Airport (OXR), Oxnard, CATo Santa Paula Airport (SZP)
Aircraft age
Not recorded
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 · landing roll
First occurrenceThe 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
Overrun
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

  • Pilot in command(cfi) › Distance/speed, inadequate
  • Pilot in command(cfi) › Proper touchdown point, not attained

Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

Basic instrument flight maneuvers were practiced on the dual instrument instructional flight. The pilot under instruction was given a series of headings, altitudes, and airspeeds to fly. These vectors terminated in the airport traffic pattern and when the pilot under instruction removed his vision restricting device, the airplane was on final approach close to the runway and left of centerline. The pilot under instruction stated that he would have gone around if he were alone and stated this to the instructor. The instructor then took control of the airplane and a landing was attempted. Witnesses said the touchdown was approximately halfway down the wet 2,650 foot-long-runway. The pilots said they felt there was no apparent braking, especially from the right brake. The airplane departed the runway, traveled through a muddy overrun area, then back onto a taxiway and into a block wall. Two skid marks were evident before and after the overrun area. The brakes were functionally checked after the accident with no discrepancies found.

Probable cause

The instructor pilot's misjudged altitude and speed, which resulted in a failure to attain the proper touchdown point causing an overrun and collision with a block wall. A factor was the wet runway, which may have hindered brake effectiveness.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record LAX99LA082
Event ID
20001204X00084
Case number
LAX99LA082
Dataset
historical-pre2008
Source SHA-256
89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
  • The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1999-01-26.
  • API snapshot SHA-256: 0a3a83f27462c010f749b2da123fedf360e68bd200081d9207e6791decbca749; retrieved 2026-09-22T15:57:01.805Z.