SEA01LA013 · Cessna 172N
Felts Field Aviation Cessna 172N · Accident: nose over during landing
From Felts Field (SFF) to Spangle Field (03WA)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA01LA013
- 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
- N734UW
- Operator
- Felts Field Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Felts Field (SFF), Spokane, WATo Spangle Field (03WA)
- 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 · landing roll
- 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
- Nose over
- 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 › Proper touchdown point, not attained
- Pilot in command › Remedial action, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During a night approach to an unlighted field, the pilot came in high in order to avoid the trees off the approach end of the runway. After crossing the runway threshold and pulling the power to idle, the pilot realized that he was too high. He therefore elected to slip the aircraft in order to lose altitude. During the slip, the aircraft drifted beyond the side boundary of the runway and touched down in an adjacent plowed field. Although the touchdown was uneventful, soon thereafter the nose gear sank into the soft dirt and the aircraft nosed over. According to the pilot, he did not realize he had allowed the aircraft to drift over the plowed field until after the nose gear started to sink into the terrain.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequately executed remedial action and his failure to ensure that the aircraft touched down at the proper location. Factors include a dark night, an unlighted runway, and trees off the approach end of the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA01LA013
- Event ID
- 20001220X45466
- Case number
- SEA01LA013
- 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 2000-11-03.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 1de29a8bc77ffef249b9ed81f444dc8faa8e98a12f6a1b24f9730451f72764b8; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:20:40.378Z.