NYC03LA032 · Cessna 172S
Airsports Aviation Cessna 172S · Accident: hard landing
From Burke Lakefront Airport (BKL) to Akron Canton Regional Airport (CAK)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC03LA032
- 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
- N782SP
- Operator
- Airsports Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Burke Lakefront Airport (BKL), Cleveland, OHTo Akron Canton Regional Airport (CAK), Akron, OH
- 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
- 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, improper
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 was landing on runway 23, a 7,597 foot-long, 150 foot-wide, asphalt runway. The airplane touched down hard and began to bounce. The airplane bounced five or six times before the pilot performed a go-around. During the second landing attempt, the pilot experienced difficulty manipulating the airplane's controls. The airplane landed hard and veered off the left side of the runway. Examination of the airplane revealed the outboard 6-inches of the propeller tips were curled aft and the upper part of the landing gear strut was pushed into and thru the firewall. Additionally, the movement of the airplane's control column, rudder pedals, aileron cables, and elevator trim was restricted due to impact damage. The pilot did not report any mechanical problems prior to the first landing attempt. A weather observation taken about the time of the accident reported that the winds were from 260 degrees at 12 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper flare which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC03LA032
- Event ID
- 20030107X00028
- Case number
- NYC03LA032
- 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, coordinates. 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: e71ed0cdf786f74aba71aa78c4b8142893711d604d2c50eacad9f6193f3dceb6; retrieved 2026-09-22T09:46:31.358Z.