IAD01LA020 · Cessna 172M
Cessna 172M · Accident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From Flying W Airport (N14) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD01LA020
- 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 172M
- 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
- N789FW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Flying W Airport (N14), MEDFORD, NJTo 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
- En route · cruise
- 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
- Airframe, component or system failure
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During a local night VFR flight, the airplane experienced a complete loss of electrical power, and the pilot returned to his home airport. The pilot was unable to activate the runway lights, but the runway was equipped with VASI approach lighting. The passenger shined a flashlight on the instruments, and the pilot performed a no-flaps approach to a landing halfway down the runway. The airplane overran the runway and struck a ditch. Interpolation of a short field landing distance performance chart from the airplane owner's manual revealed that the distance required to land over a 50-foot obstacle with no flaps deployed was 1,687 feet. The runway was 3,496 feet long, and 75 feet wide. The pilot was issued his pilot certificate on the day before the accident, and had 47 hours of flight experience, 3.5 hours of which was at night. All of his flight experience was in make and model. A test of the airplane's electrical system revealed that the voltage regulator was inoperative.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to attain the proper touchdown point. Factors included the loss of electrical power, the dark night, and the pilot's lack of night experience.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD01LA020
- Event ID
- 20001226X45488
- Case number
- IAD01LA020
- 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 2000-12-19.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 6fa4dfb2a533f28ffd1f7d0ad8e5c6c4fd6b110424e8193a16c55d4ea333e430; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:16:25.101Z.