CHI01FA093 · Cessna 172H
Cessna 172H · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
From Centralia Municipal Airport (ENL) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI01FA093
- 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
- 2 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- 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 172H
- 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
- N733SS
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Centralia Municipal Airport (ENL), Centralia, ILTo 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
- Approach
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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
- Stall
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Dual student › Airspeed, low
- Dual student › Stall, inadvertent
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Remedial action, delayed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was destroyed when it impacted terrain 1.2 miles from the airport on a magnetic bearing of 003 degrees from the approach end of runway 18. The CFI weighed approximately 149 pounds and the student pilot weighed approximately 310 pounds. A witness reported seeing the airplane traveling toward him from west to east. He reported hearing the airplane's engine initially, and that the engine was at a low power setting. He reported the airplane was low, about 500 feet, and the airspeed was slow. The airplane was in a steep angle of bank and in a turn to the right. He reported the airplane was in "...a kind of a climb in a bank." After 270 degrees of turn, the airplane flipped over on its back and became inverted. The nose of the airplane then went down. He reported the nose of the airplane started coming up and the airplane looked like it was going to recover when he lost sight of the airplane behind a tree line. He reported hearing the airplane's engine revving to full power before hearing it impact the terrain. An examination of the airplane's system revealed no anomalies.
Probable cause
The student pilot allowed the airspeed to get too low and inadvertently stalled the airplane, and the CFI delayed in taking remedial action.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI01FA093
- Event ID
- 20010223X00506
- Case number
- CHI01FA093
- 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: c42199f1471b9a344ceb64dd740b38cb73854ceee70b7ce124c52848d448ddff; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:38:54.251Z.