LAX98LA201 · Cessna 172N
Fast Aviation Cessna 172N · Accident: hard landing
From Van Nuys Airport (VNY) to Santa Barbara Municipal Airport (SBA)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX98LA201
- 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
- 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
- N6417J
- Operator
- Fast Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Van Nuys Airport (VNY), Van Nuys, CATo Santa Barbara Municipal Airport (SBA)
- 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
- 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, misjudged
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Santa Barbara, CA, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The pilot misjudged the landing flare and the aircraft landed hard rupturing the nosewheel tire. The tire was replaced and the mechanic who replaced the tire declared the aircraft airworthy. The aircraft was flown to its home base where it was examined and found to have a distorted firewall and boot cowl. This was reported as an incident on April 8, 1998, and was upgraded to an accident on June 17, 1998.
Probable cause
The pilot's misjudging the landing flare and subsequent hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX98LA201
- Event ID
- 20001211X09901
- Case number
- LAX98LA201
- 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: 70d5237d95c72fe6ae218a48d81cd12b11d4da886c3a4053d48d11415a505d43; retrieved 2026-09-22T17:53:59.063Z.