IAD04CA001 · Cessna 172P
Century Air Cessna 172P · Accident: overrun during landing
From Essex County Airport (CDW) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD04CA001
- 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
- N98145
- Operator
- Century Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Essex County Airport (CDW), Fairfield, NJTo 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
- Overrun
- 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(cfi) › Go-around, not performed
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the approach and landing, the flight instructor was at the controls with the student pilot, and was also talking him through the maneuvers. The airplane touched down about "midfield" on a wet runway. It subsequently hydroplaned, and overran the runway's departure end. The nose landing gear then encountered mud, and the left wing tip and the propeller struck the ground. Before and after the accident, the brakes operated normally. The runway was 3,499 feet long, and had a displaced threshold of 1,100 feet. The flight instructor stated that the winds were calm at the time of the accident; however, winds reported at the airport shortly beforehand indicated a 4-knot tailwind for the runway utilized. The flight instructor also stated that the approach and landing speeds may have been higher than normal.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's failure to initiate a go-around. A factor was the wet runway conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD04CA001
- Event ID
- 20040121X00078
- Case number
- IAD04CA001
- 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: 3f8ff40b788e2d296e4a60146da87094afdd6e0914a82b3bea00fba6f82e4d06; retrieved 2026-09-22T08:24:27.060Z.