DEN00LA129 · Cessna 172N
Cessna 172N · Accident: hard landing
From 00C to OOC
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN00LA129
- 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
- N4642J
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 00CTo OOC
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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
- Pilot in command › Flare, premature
- Pilot in command › Porpoise/pilot-induced oscillation, inadvertent
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Durango, CO, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The solo student planned to make a touch-and-go landing on runway 1. The takeoff and landing approach were uneventful. The student said he deployed 20 degrees of flaps and slowed the airplane to about 65 knots. As he approached the runway threshold, he closed the throttle and raised the nose. The airplane 'started to go up and down too rapidly.' The main landing gear 'hit hard' and the airplane 'bounced off the ground and . . .started to torque to the left. The airplane then landed on its nose gear and skidded left off the runway,' coming to rest against a barbed wire fence.
Probable cause
The pilot prematurely flaring the airplane for landing, resulting in a hard landing, followed by an inadvertent pilot-induced porpoise and loss of directional control. A factor was the fence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN00LA129
- Event ID
- 20001212X21217
- Case number
- DEN00LA129
- 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: a3cc9ea18ce074fd7e72b690822e696fb0c37355228fdcf0ef4f1c49da7e5b1c; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:45:37.390Z.