LAX00LA152 · Cessna 172N
Resort Aviation Cessna 172N · Accident: in flight collision with object during landing
From 1O2 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX00LA152
- 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 172N
- 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
- N6104G
- Operator
- Resort Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 1O2To 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 · 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 › Aborted landing, delayed
- Pilot in command › Distance/speed, misjudged
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Proper touchdown point, not attained
- Pilot in command › Raising of flaps, not performed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane collided with trees and terrain during an aborted landing attempt following a high, steep, and fast approach. The airplane touched down past the halfway point on the runway in a hard landing and bounced severely. The pilot added power to recover and made a smooth landing on the right side of the runway, and then reduced the power to idle and began aggressive braking to stop. As the airplane approached the departure end of the runway, the pilot increased power and pulled the airplane back into the air. The flaps were still full down at this point and the airplane would not climb. The pilot powered down and landed between trees directly ahead. Then the right wing tip hit hard and the airplane cartwheeled. The Pilot's Operating Handbook for the Cessna 172N states that flaps should be retracted to 20 degrees immediately upon commencing a balked landing (go around.) The airplane was approximately 27 pounds over certified maximum gross weight. The engine was test run in the airframe following recovery from the site. During the test it started immediately and ran smoothly, with normal magneto checks.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to continue with a high, steep, and fast approach, which resulted in a touchdown beyond the halfway point of the runway and the inability to stop on the remaining pavement, and, his delayed decision to initiate a landing abort. Also causal was the pilot's failure to retract the flaps to the go around/aborted landing position.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX00LA152
- Event ID
- 20001212X20851
- Case number
- LAX00LA152
- 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 2000-04-11.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 3e3eb60afc58a616e94e900b61a6be9e9b91d29d0a71181b94c4226afb0bb3b9; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:59:05.025Z.