ATL98LA122 · Cessna 172B
Cessna 172B · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water during landing
From X28 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL98LA122
- 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 172B
- 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
- N8096X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From X28To 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
- 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- 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(vs), not attained
- Pilot in command › Performance data, disregarded
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot stated to local law enforcement officers who responded to the accident site, that after takeoff from a private field in New Port Richey, FL, a left turn was made to enter the practice landing pattern. During the turn, the airplane descended into the trees. The pilot reported that the airplane's fuel tanks were filled to capacity just before the flight. The report filed by the police officer at the scene indicated that the pilot weighed about 250 pounds, his right front seat passenger weighed about 300 pounds, and the rear seat passenger weighed about 200 pounds. Additionally, a 50 pound bag of sand was found in the rear of the baggage compartment. The temperature at the time of the accident was about 84 degrees with an altimeter setting of 29.94' Hg. The wind was calm.
Probable cause
The pilots disregard of the performance capabilities of the airplane, his failure to attain and maintain flying speed, and his exceeding of the airplane's maximum weight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL98LA122
- Event ID
- 20001211X11000
- Case number
- ATL98LA122
- 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: 2fd2c2de4db4d7617decc5759466a051b0a3678705e767488e56b147c2cdb041; retrieved 2026-09-22T16:52:11.892Z.