SEA96LA101 · Cessna 177
Cessna 177 · Accident: hard landing
From Corvallis Municipal Airport (CVO) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA96LA101
- 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 177
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 177
- 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
- N177JM
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Corvallis Municipal Airport (CVO)To not recorded
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- 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
- Pilot in command › Distance/altitude, misjudged
- Pilot in command › Flare, premature
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot stated that while he was on 'short final' for runway 27 at the Corvallis Municipal Airport, the sun 'came from behind a cloud with some glare and visibility problems....' He stated that he 'could not tell [the airplane's] height [above the runway] accurately.' He stated that he began to flare for landing after he 'judged that the dark pavement was just below.' The airplane landed hard on the main landing gear and porpoised forward onto the nose gear. The nose gear collapsed and the firewall was substantially damaged. No preimpact mechanical deficiency was reported.
Probable cause
failure of the pilot to properly judge the distance and altitude to the runway just before touching down, and his premature flare for landing. Factors relating to the accident were: the presence of sun glare during the landing, and the resultant degradation of the pilot's visual perception.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA96LA101
- Event ID
- 20001208X05880
- Case number
- SEA96LA101
- 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 1996-05-27.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 0f5c6c1adb76b412dc4659d2df9999b6c8a3709d02eb9aae7762ed58130de000; retrieved 2026-09-22T22:26:21.147Z.