FTW97LA234 · Cessna 182Q
Cessna 182Q · Accident: hard landing
From Sugar Land Regional Airport (SGR) to Lake Charles, LA
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW97LA234
- 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 182Q
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N96TJ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sugar Land Regional Airport (SGR)To Lake Charles, LA
- 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 › Flare, improper
- Pilot in command › Recovery from bounced landing, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, he intended to fly to Lake Charles, Louisiana. Approximately 20 minutes into his flight, the pilot reversed his course and returned to Sugar Land Municipal Airport due to weather. The pilot reported that he 'flared the airplane too high' and 'on returning to earth there was a loud crunch from the front nose wheel and the aircraft veered sharply to the left.' The pilot added that the airplane crossed the taxiway and came to rest in a ditch on the east side of Runway 17.
Probable cause
the pilot's improper landing flare and improper recovery from a bounced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW97LA234
- Event ID
- 20001208X08131
- Case number
- FTW97LA234
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- 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: 4d06bc5d0024504b4d2e928d99476c27c3d6ea12fe6c8360dff72eda0c12724c; retrieved 2026-09-22T19:23:23.796Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: destination. The narrative states "he intended to fly to Lake Charles, Louisiana" before he turned back to Sugar Land because of weather; the destination was not recorded.