NYC00FA106 · Cessna 172P
Cessna 172P · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From 5B2 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC00FA106
- 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
- 2 · 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 172P
- 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
- N98574
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 5B2To 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Aircraft control › Not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and student pilot departed on a local training flight. Witnesses observed the airplane on its initial climb roll off on its left wing and descend into a wooded area. One witness thought the airplane was in a steep nose up climb prior to rolling left and descending. A post crash fire destroyed the cockpit/cabin, and the seat rails and forward seats could not identified. No evidence of a pre-existing mechanical failure or malfunction was found with the airplane or engine. A previous seat slippage was documented for the left seat in the airplane a month earlier. However, there was no evidence that it had occurred again. The airplane was equipped with primary seat locks to prevent the seats from slipping off of the end of the seat rails. Cessna Aircraft Co. issued a service bulletin on secondary seat locks to prevent rearward seat slippage, which they classified as mandatory. However, the bulletin had not been accomplished on the airplane, and was not required by the FAA. A check of medical records revealed the student pilot was 6 ft 3 inches tall, and weighed 288 pounds, while the flight instructor was 5 ft, 10 inches tall, and weighted 156 pounds.
Probable cause
a loss of control for undetermined reason(s).
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC00FA106
- Event ID
- 20001212X20712
- Case number
- NYC00FA106
- 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: 9c373b6ed927dd38c49be1c1f505a04f5e50f6421d9e4e5ba72d6b94195d9e93; retrieved 2026-09-20T21:22:47.611Z.