NYC97LA090 · Cessna 172P
Cessna 172P · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
From Morristown Municipal Airport (MMU) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC97LA090
- 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 172P
- 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
- N65983
- Operator
- American Flyers
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Morristown Municipal Airport (MMU)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
- 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
- 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
- Flight instructor(on ground) › Operation with known deficiencies in equipment, improper
- Flight instructor(on ground) › Supervision, inadequate
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Morristown, NJ, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
This was the instructor's second instructional flight with the student, and he had given no prior night instruction to the student. The student had a total flight experience of 52 hours, of which .7 was night time, logged in January 1997. During this second instructional flight, the instructor elected to verbally authorize the student to conduct his first supervised solo at night with an inoperative landing light. The student stated that it was very dark and there was no visible horizon when he elected to perform a go-around during the third landing attempt. The student pilot also stated that he thought the airplane was in a 'high pitch attitude' during the go-around. During the go-around, the airplane descended and impacted the ground. A manager of the operator stated that it was a standard operating procedure to alternate instructor's on a regular basis, and typically a student would receive instruction from several different instructor's prior to solo.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's inadequate supervision which allowed the student to solo at night with less than one hour of night instruction with a known inoperative landing and taxi light. A Factor was the student pilot's spatial disorientation which resulted in the loss of control.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC97LA090
- Event ID
- 20001208X08000
- Case number
- NYC97LA090
- 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 1997-05-13.
- API snapshot SHA-256: f975d74eeb78a675002a98cc3bf354393b5d1d4409a5c454b75ba97c04d56c50; retrieved 2026-09-21T12:06:55.782Z.