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CHI03LA079 · Cessna 172R

5 Mar 2003 · St. Paul, MN, United States

Cessna 172R · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing

From South St Paul Municipal Airport/Richard E Fleming Field (SGS) to an unrecorded destination

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Event

NTSB case
CHI03LA079
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 172R

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
N35307
Operator
Unknown
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From South St Paul Municipal Airport/Richard E Fleming Field (SGS), St. Paul, MNTo 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 · landing roll
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 on ground/water
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 › Directional control, not maintained

Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

The airplane was damaged when it departed the runway and nosed over during a student solo flight. A report submitted by the airplane operator and signed by the pilot states that, on landing, the student pilot lost directional control and departed the right side of the runway. The report further states that the "airplane may have been fast on approach, and subsequently landed flat and fast." No preexisting mechanical defects were found during a postaccident examination of the airplane. The student pilot had a total of 37.5 hours of flight experience.

Probable cause

The loss of directional control by the solo student pilot. A factor to the accident was the excessive speed during landing.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record CHI03LA079
Event ID
20030314X00338
Case number
CHI03LA079
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: 8db6139879b05946e290c6f21d5a25abbbaaa6491ae52b603c9155248e1d501a; retrieved 2026-09-22T09:33:00.954Z.