DEN02LA086 · Cessna 172N
Cessna 172N · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From 3V5 · FT Collins, CO to 3V5
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN02LA086
- 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
- N5088K
- Operator
- The Pilot Center
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 3V5 · FT Collins, COTo 3V5
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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/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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Soft field takeoff/procedure, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Stall/mush, encountered
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot had just finished practicing several soft field take offs and landings with an instructor and was on his first solo flight of the day. After taxing to the end of runway, he pulled the yoke back all the way, and added full power. Following rotation, the airplane came straight up in a 45-degree incline. At approximately 20 feet in the air, the airplane drifted off to the right of the runway, struck the ground with its left wing tip, bounced up and then it struck the ground a second time. The ground impact collapsed and sheered off the nose landing gear, buckled the firewall, and bent the outboard 4 feet of the right wing spar.
Probable cause
the student pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control and subsequent inadvertent stall/mush into terrain during a soft field take off. Contributing factors include the pilot's lack of experience and the high density altitude conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN02LA086
- Event ID
- 20020808X01331
- Case number
- DEN02LA086
- 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: 1c8ecfda38d97a19f801d025fa1412333e5e9fca206ee31d2645fd5490deae50; retrieved 2026-09-22T10:38:49.515Z.