ANC97LA063 · Cessna 170B
Cessna 170B · Accident: hard landing
From Lake Hood Airport (Z41) to Goose Bay Airport (Z40)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC97LA063
- 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 170B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 170
- 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
- N3417C
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Hood Airport (Z41), AKTo Goose Bay Airport (Z40)
- 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(cfi) › Aircraft preflight, inadequate
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Recovery from bounced landing, not attained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A flight instructor (CFI) was providing pre-solo flight instruction to a student pilot in a tailwheel equipped airplane. The student was practicing touch-and-go landings, and his landing approach was slightly high and fast. The airplane touched down on the runway and bounced upward to about 10 ft above the ground. The instructor added power, and attempted to correct the situation. The airplane touched down a second time, and again bounced into the air. The instructor's seat suddenly released and slid aft, preventing him from reaching the flight controls. The airplane touched down a third time along the left side of the runway. The left main landing gear broke at its fuselage attach point, and the left wing struck the ground. An inspection of the instructor's seat did not reveal any malfunction of the latching mechanism. The student pilot had accrued 14.5 hours of total instructional flight time, with 6.8 hours of instruction accrued in the accident airplane.
Probable cause
the flight instructor's inadequate preflight by failing to ensure his seat was properly latched, and his resultant failure (or inability) to recover from the student pilot's bounced landing. A factor associated with the accident was: the student pilot's improper flare during the landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC97LA063
- Event ID
- 20001208X07653
- Case number
- ANC97LA063
- 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 1997-04-29.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 41fcf33e1712e1d844d18d62feea3c78df74016be7dab696eab4937a56b963f3; retrieved 2026-09-22T19:51:33.326Z.