CHI01LA133 · Cessna 172M
Illinois Aviation Academy Cessna 172M · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From Dupage Airport (DPA) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI01LA133
- 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
- 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 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
- N13474
- Operator
- Illinois Aviation Academy
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dupage Airport (DPA), West Chicago, 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
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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 › Compensation for wind conditions, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The right main landing gear collapsed when it struck a runway sign after a loss of directional control during landing. The student pilot reported, "At the point which I wanted to touchdown, my airspeed was still greater than I wanted, so I kept the aircraft off the ground until I reached a slower airspeed. I encountered a gust of wind, which pushed the plane left with the wind, and at the same time I touched the ground. As I touched the ground the plane immediately headed off the runway. The result was hitting a runway marking sign causing the right main landing gear to collapse and causing damage to the right stabilizer." The student pilot also stated, "I did not have enough crosswind correction for the winds, which caused my situation." The student pilot had a total of 18 hours of flight time, and the accident flight was the second solo flight.
Probable cause
The inadequate compensation for the crosswind by the student pilot. Additional factors included the student pilot's lack of total flight time, the runway sign and the crosswind.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI01LA133
- Event ID
- 20010511X00928
- Case number
- CHI01LA133
- 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: 832fc0e7ac53ae92f920aaa6309aefd6f236af5ba64a270863dba1d8a28cf7cf; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:58:26.417Z.