NYC00LA095 · Cessna 172
Cessna 172 · Accident: in flight collision with object on approach
From P234 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC00LA095
- 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
- N6261E
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From P234To 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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
- 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 › Compensation for wind conditions, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was making an approach towards the east, to an east-west, 1,500-foot grass airstrip. The airstrip was located in an area of rolling hills and valleys. The approach was flown over a valley, with the final segment flown over an up-slope of a hill. The runway threshold was on top of that hill. On short final, the airplane encountered windshear. The pilot added full power and pitched nose-up to initiate a go-around. However, the airplane descended rapidly, hit treetops, then 'mushed' into the ground about 20 feet short of the runway. Winds, recorded about 5 nautical miles away, were from 120 degrees true, at 16, gusting to 30 knots. The seven previous hourly observations included winds at 18 to 20 knots, with six of those having gusts at or above 30 knots. The pilot had about 9,000 hours of flight time, and was a captain for a major air cargo carrier.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate compensation for the gusty wind conditions. A factor was the windshear encountered on final approach.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC00LA095
- Event ID
- 20001212X20720
- Case number
- NYC00LA095
- 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: c14f81696857a52d57e4d6f9d00025f79bde3bc2748f65dd627aeecad0aeb2e4; retrieved 2026-09-22T13:02:32.165Z.