CHI96LA136 · Cessna 172N
Cessna 172N · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Dane County Regional Truax Field (MSN) to C29
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI96LA136
- 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 172N
- 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
- N739BN
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dane County Regional Truax Field (MSN), Madison, WITo C29
- 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
- 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
- Loss of control on ground/water
- 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 › Directional control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On final approach to runway 12, the pilot selected 30 degrees of flaps and maintained 65 knots indicated airspeed. The pilot used right aileron and opposite rudder on final. He said the airplane required constant adjustments to the flight controls to hold the extended centerline. He stated that his touchdown was a bit hard and left of centerline. The airplane exited the left side of the runway and nosed over after encountering soft mud. The pilot said that on the landing roll, he did not maintain directional control as aggressively as he did on final approach, and that he should have used less than 30 degrees of flaps. A weather station reported winds from 170 degrees at 13 knots with gusts to 18 knots.
Probable cause
failure of the pilot to maintain directional control of the airplane during the landing, which resulted in an inadvertent ground swerve. Factors relating to the accident were: the gusty crosswind condition, the pilot's excessive lowering of flaps, and the encounter with soft terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI96LA136
- Event ID
- 20001208X05536
- Case number
- CHI96LA136
- 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: investigation status. 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: bc40cfd0a0d139bc36e24a885ee2ae25ee4b991db89388bc3bf559d4dba16a04; retrieved 2026-09-22T22:36:45.254Z.