CHI00LA242 · Cessna 172R
Cessna 172R · Accident: hard landing
From South Bend International Airport (SBN) to Lost Creek Airport (5Y4)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI00LA242
- 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 172R
- 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
- N395ES
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From South Bend International Airport (SBN), South Bend, INTo Lost Creek Airport (5Y4)
- 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
- 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 › Flare, misjudged
- Pilot in command › Porpoise/pilot-induced oscillation, encountered
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was damaged during a nose over following a nose gear collapse while landing. The pilot said that during landing the '... plane ballooned and gained noticeable altitude. At this point I [the pilot] determined that it was too late to do a go-around. During the attempt to get on the runway, main gear contact was made very hard, bouncing plane airborne. Then the plane porpoised down the runway until the nose gear collapsed.' The pilot indicated no mechanical failure or malfunction in his report of the accident. A postaccident examination of the aircraft failed to reveal any anomalies that could be associated with a preexisting condition. The pilot's airman certificate was issued on July 6, 2000. The pilot listed, in his written report, 88.1 hours total flight time and 29.9 hours as pilot in command.
Probable cause
the misjudged flare and porpoise encountered during landing by the pilot. A factor to the accident was the collapse of the nose gear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI00LA242
- Event ID
- 20001212X21670
- Case number
- CHI00LA242
- 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 2000-08-05.
- API snapshot SHA-256: e4157881e5f876c6072a73733e0017164cb833dbeb81e9b3136b75b28170c253; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:37:31.909Z.