FTW04LA146 · Cessna 172P
Cessna 172P · Accident: hard landing
From Addison Airport (ADS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW04LA146
- 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
- N98885
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Addison Airport (ADS), Addison, TXTo 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 · 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
- Dual student › Flare, delayed
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Supervision, 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 single-engine airplane landed hard on Runway 35, during an instructional flight. The flight instructor reported that on final approach, the airspeed was at 65 knots and the student pilot was delaying the landing flare. The flight instructor allowed the student pilot to continue the landing because he expected the landing to "be flat and on all three wheels at the same time, then discuss the pros/cons of the approach to land during the taxi back." The instructor put his right hand on the yoke and started to add slight backpressure. At this time, the instructor's headset began to come off, preventing him from stating, "my controls;" however, he pulled back harder on the yoke when he noticed the student pilot was applying opposite pressure. The instructor was unable to raise the nose, thus resulting in a nose wheel first landing. After landing, the instructor grabbed the yoke with both hands and applied backpressure, and the airplane lifted off the ground. The instructor realized that something was wrong with the propeller, so he pulled the throttle and the mixture out and landed the airplane. As he lowered the nose, the airplane continued to nose-over.
Probable cause
The student pilot's delayed landing flare and the improper supervision provided by the flight instructor.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW04LA146
- Event ID
- 20040603X00727
- Case number
- FTW04LA146
- 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: e075ff743bbfead5c86c03f0148bace2478bcc0351bf541e0a343db2331373e1; retrieved 2026-09-22T07:25:41.159Z.