CHI00LA017 · Cessna 172
Cessna 172 · Accident: in flight collision with object during landing
From Houston County Airport (CHU) to Waukon Municipal Airport (Y01)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI00LA017
- 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 172
- 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
- N52569
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Houston County Airport (CHU), Caledonia, MNTo Waukon Municipal Airport (Y01)
- 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
- In flight collision with object
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Tree(s)
- 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 › Directional control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported he flew over the airport to determine which runway to use based on the winds. He chose to land on runway 25. At 1645, the winds at an airport 12 nautical miles to the west were reported as 150 degrees at 15 knots gusting to 22 knots. The pilot reported he attempted to land but did a go-around. The pilot executed an aborted landing on his second attempt to land. Concerning his second attempt to land, he reported, 'This time I knew that I would need to press hard on the rudder so I moved my feet down, pressed hard on the rudder and slipped the plane down to the runway. After I landed, I kept pressing hard on the pedals thinking that I was on the brakes.' He reported, 'I kept pressing hard and the plane was not slowing down and was being blown off the runway to the North. I then decided to try and go around again-so I gave it full power and lifted off, but I was blown right into the fence. The plane kept rising but then started to stall so I brought it back down and went through two more fences and I hit a pole which took off the end of the wing before hitting a road bank head-on which stopped the plane.'
Probable cause
the pilot failed to maintain directional control of the airplane during the aborted landing. Factors relating to the accident included the crosswinds, the fence, and the trees.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI00LA017
- Event ID
- 20001212X19928
- Case number
- CHI00LA017
- 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: a1f2826736eaa54d82646d98346efdb2fc9a4bfda7675870a962667b136d99ed; retrieved 2026-09-22T13:46:58.284Z.