FTW99LA260 · Cessna 172K
Cessna 172K · Accident: on ground/water collision with terrain/water during landing
From Boone County Airport (HRO) to Biangabip Airport (BPK)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW99LA260
- 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 172K
- 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
- N84697
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Boone County Airport (HRO), Harrison, ARTo Biangabip Airport (BPK)
- 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 · aborted
- 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
- On ground/water 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 › Proper alignment, not attained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Dark night conditions prevailed for the cross-country flight. During the landing at the destination airport (non-towered), the private pilot confused the lighted runway and lighted parallel taxiway and landed the airplane on the grass between the taxiway and the runway. Although he initiated a go-around, the right main landing gear struck the edge of the taxiway crossover during the aborted landing. The nose gear collapsed, the airplane became airborne and traveled approximately 500 feet before impacting the ground in a nose down attitude and overturning. The pilot's total flight time was 99.5 hours. He had 5.3 hours total night flight time of which 2.1 hours were PIC flight time. The pilot reported that the accident could have been prevented by 'more training on night time operations.'
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to obtain runway alignment. Factors were the dark night conditions, an embankment, and the pilot's lack of total experience flying at night.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW99LA260
- Event ID
- 20001212X19769
- Case number
- FTW99LA260
- 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 1999-09-17.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 1f1a869c39b9a981f549feb15da56caafc44ca38b99872d5c37fa288b71cff9b; retrieved 2026-09-22T14:07:38.422Z.