LAX02LA133 · Cessna 172S
Cessna 172S · Accident: hard landing
From Grand Canyon National Park Airport (GCN) to Phoenix Deer Valley Airport (DVT)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX02LA133
- 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
- N3512T
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Grand Canyon National Park Airport (GCN), Grand Canyon, AZTo Phoenix Deer Valley Airport (DVT), Phoenix, AZ
- 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
- 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/mush
- 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, high
- Pilot in command › Stall/mush, encountered
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot said that everything was fine through the traffic pattern to the flare for landing. The pilot said, "During flare, blinded momentarily by sunlight, difficulties to judge altitude above RWY (runway) correctly. Flared too high." The pilot said he kept the nose of the airplane up to protect the nosewheel. He said, "... speed bled off ... resulting in heavy bumps onto the RWY together with stall warning." The pilot said that after 3 or 4 bumps, the airplane stayed on the runway. The pilot then taxied to the ramp. The pilot concluded, "I simply landed the airplane too high due to the lighting conditions and my landing picture based on my experience landing an Airbus A340." The pilot also concluded in recommendations he provided that he get more landings "to get the right picture during (the) flare." A post-accident examination of the airplane revealed no anomalies.
Probable cause
the pilot flaring the airplane too high above the runway causing a stall and resulting in the hard landing. Factors relating to the accident were the light conditions (dusk) and the pilot's lack of total experience in the type of airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX02LA133
- Event ID
- 20020417X00528
- Case number
- LAX02LA133
- 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, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2002-04-05.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 91e079c8c7d6f574e76622e32bfa4ac250712a80e1792c39f7bceefc0333fd39; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:01:43.538Z.