IAD96LA125 · Cessna 172M
Cessna 172M · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
From Cincinnati Municipal Airport Lunken Field (LUK) to Cincinnati Municipal Airport Lunken Field (LUK)
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD96LA125
- 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 172M
- 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
- N172PS
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cincinnati Municipal Airport Lunken Field (LUK)To Cincinnati Municipal Airport Lunken Field (LUK)
- 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
- Approach · VFR go-around
- 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 in flight
- 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/spin
- 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, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Stall/spin, inadvertent
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Cincinnati, OH, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot was on her first solo flight. She was instructed by her flight instructor (CFI) to make 3 touch-and-go landings and one full stop landing while he watched. For her first touch-and-go, she departed on the left parallel runway. For traffic considerations, the tower controller cleared her to runway 21R for her first landing. Her execution of the landing on 21R was uneventful. During climb-out, the tower controller cleared her back to runway 21L. On her second attempted landing, she flared 20 or more feet above the surface of the runway. Realizing her error, she attempted to apply full throttle and lowered the nose to gain airspeed until she could retract the wing flaps, which were fully extended. She attempted to execute a go-around; however, the aircraft stalled. Reportedly, it veered to the left, pitched down and did a complete reversal before coming to rest well east of runway 21L.
Probable cause
failure of the student pilot to maintain sufficient airspeed during an attempted go-around, which resulted in a stall/spin and an uncontrolled collision with the ground. A factor related to the accident was: an improper (premature) flare for landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD96LA125
- Event ID
- 20001208X06526
- Case number
- IAD96LA125
- 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: 213ced3175c597da4831d8de1491ea228e494766e53e4162bcb79437890cf037; retrieved 2026-09-22T21:35:49.066Z.