CHI01LA205 · Cessna 172S
Northern Illinois Flight Center Cessna 172S · Accident: hard landing
From Lake in the Hills Airport (3CK) to IL
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI01LA205
- 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 172S
- 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
- N795SP
- Operator
- Northern Illinois Flight Center
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake in the Hills Airport (3CK), Lake in the Hills, ILTo IL
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane sustained substantial damage during a hard landing. The pilot was uninjured during the solo instructional flight. The student pilot stated, "As the plane touched down on runway it seemed to land on main wheels but harder that normal and bounced upward at this time[.] I added a little throttle to level plane back for proper landing and then pulled throttle back to idle as plane had smoothed out to flair however the plane touched the runway even a little harder than first bounced and I felt the plane was not safe to land at this time and did another go around. I did not feel or see the prop or tail of plane touch runway surface[.] As I did the proper procedure for go around the plane seemed to fly proper. I then was instructed to use runway 08 for landing because of other traffic on route to 08 on final. I followed this plane in after it had cleared the runway and landed the plane with more of a normal landing. At this time a instructor greeted me upon securing the plane and damage was noted with prop being bent on both ends." The student pilot and instructor pilot stated that there were no "mechanical malfunction failure" with the airplane during the flight. The wind in the area was 080 degrees at 10 knots.
Probable cause
The student pilot misjudging the flare during that landing. Factors were the wrong runway selected by the student pilot, the tailwinds encountered during that landing and the flight instructor's inadequate supervision during that landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI01LA205
- Event ID
- 20010713X01423
- Case number
- CHI01LA205
- 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: 0d85840e02b654a1d266b816bddf04a9f6c385ed6c722a920f25160c896202ed; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:46:52.530Z.