ATL03LA060 · Cessna 172P
Cessna 172P · Accident: hard landing
From Concord-Padgett Regional Airport (JQF) to Concord-Padgett Regional Airport (JQF)
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL03LA060
- 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 172P
- 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
- N52546
- Operator
- Francis Michael McLaurin
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Concord-Padgett Regional Airport (JQF), Concord, NCTo Concord-Padgett Regional Airport (JQF), Concord, NC
- 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
- Pilot in command › Recovery from bounced landing, 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 initiated the landing flare at idle or very low power, and the airplane bounced about four times. Each bounce was higher and more pronounced than the previous one. The pilot stated that he thought the bounces would stop, and he concentrated on keeping the airplane as straight as possible on the runway. After the third or fourth bounce, the nosewheel tire blew, and the propeller struck the ground. The airplane came to a stop in the center of the runway, and the pilot shut down the engine. The pilot stated that, after the accident, he flew with a flight instructor and learned what a porpoise condition is, how to recognize it, and how to recover the airplane from it.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper flare during touchdown and failure to properly recover from a bounced landing, which resulted in a loss of control and inflight collision with the runway. A factor was the pilot did not understand the porpoise condition during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL03LA060
- Event ID
- 20030314X00335
- Case number
- ATL03LA060
- 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 2003-03-09.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d7162b7047e572af0303fa20f324af3c8f9b890d4fec89ecda6f5a6e559e8388; retrieved 2026-09-22T09:31:27.666Z.