LAX96LA235 · Cessna 172N
Cessna 172N · Accident: hard landing
From John Wayne Orange County International Airport (SNA) to Catalina Airport (AVX)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's aircraft involved. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96LA235
- 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 Possible conflict
- 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
- N6261D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From John Wayne Orange County International Airport (SNA), Santa Ana, CATo Catalina Airport (AVX)
- 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
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Stall
- 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 › Airspeed(vr), not attained
- Pilot in command › Directional control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Flare, not performed
- Pilot in command › Ground loop/swerve, inadvertent
- Pilot in command › Stall, encountered
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Ground witnesses stated that the pilot did not flare and the aircraft touched down hard on the nose wheel and porpoised twice. On the second bounce the aircraft veered off the runway and toward a line of parked aircraft. The pilot attempted to recover by adding power; however, the aircraft stalled, impacted the ground, and collided with three parked aircraft.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to initiate a landing flare, which resulted in a bounced landing and porpoise, and his loss of directional control during an attempt to initiate a go-around with insufficient airspeed, which resulted in an inadvertent stall/mush and collision with parked aircraft. A visual illusion created by the runway gradient was a factor in this accident.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96LA235
- Event ID
- 20001208X06036
- Case number
- LAX96LA235
- 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: 09bb709af741a6a37e15279db058ea669c5326f2aa812ce83e632c15d2df878a; retrieved 2026-09-22T22:13:27.412Z.