DEN02LA003 · Cessna 172N
Utah Valley Aviation Cessna 172N · Accident: hard landing
From Provo Municipal Airport (PVU) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN02LA003
- 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 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
- N5552E
- Operator
- Utah Valley Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Provo Municipal Airport (PVU), Provo, UTTo 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
- 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 › Recovery from bounced landing, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A witness said that he saw the airplane land with a loud "crunching sound." He said the airplane oscillated several times before rolling out to the end of the runway 31. The pilot said that the airplane landed with what seemed a normal bounce, but bounced a second time which seemed harder. He said that after tying the airplane down, he looked for damage, but could not see any due to the dark night light conditions. Postaccident examination revealed that the firewall was bent, stringers in the fuselage underside were bent, the control yoke would not move, and attachment bolts were broken in the nose gear. The pilot's flight logbook indicated that he had approximately 63 hours of total flight experience. He had flown approximately 13 hours during the last 44 months, and he had a flight review endorsement dated June 5, 2001. The pilot had not flown in the previous 4 and 1/2 months prior to the accident flight.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper recovery from a bounced landing. Contributing factors were the pilot's lack of total experience in aircraft, and the pilot's lack of recent experience in kind of aircraft.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN02LA003
- Event ID
- 20011105X02196
- Case number
- DEN02LA003
- 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 2001-10-21.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 062ead9d195c537c8a602c4a8bb904c69c076484bc5a931e445d14685c6a24d3; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:30:32.117Z.