ATL07CA132 · Cessna C172N
Manassas Aviation Center Cessna C172N · Accident: hard landing
From Washington Manassas Harry P. Davis Field (HEF) to Washington Manassas Harry P. Davis Field (HEF)
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL07CA132
- 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 C172N
- 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
- N733BS
- Operator
- Manassas Aviation Center
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Washington Manassas Harry P. Davis Field (HEF), Manassas, VATo Washington Manassas Harry P. Davis Field (HEF), Manassas, VA
- 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 › Porpoise/pilot-induced oscillation, not corrected
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the student pilot's certified flight instructor (CFI), the student pilot was training under the United Stated Marine Corps Introductory Flight Screening Program, prior to attending the Naval Flight School at Pensacola, Florida. The student pilot reported to the CFI that he was making his third solo flight, in the traffic pattern and that the airplane bounced several times while he was attempting to land and that he had landed hard on the nose wheel, busting the tire. Inspection of the airplane revealed the tire had burst, the nose gear wheel was broken and the propeller had struck the runway. A Chief CFI at another flight school on the field advised that he had observed the incident. He stated that the student porpoised several times, making no apparent attempt to recover. The student pilot left the airport and returned to his barracks at Quantico. He met with the administrators of the Introductory Flight Screening program and advised them that he had been nervous during all flights and had decided flying was not for him. He dropped himself from the program. On October 2, 2007, further inspection of the airplane revealed that there was damage to the airplane's firewall.
Probable cause
The student pilot's failure to correct for a pilot-induced oscillation/porpoise, during flare/touchdown, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL07CA132
- Event ID
- 20071107X01744
- Case number
- ATL07CA132
- 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: 5a806b5cd8857a5ac12bff64cf26f465d40908817563d7895d708714a069062f; retrieved 2026-09-22T03:29:40.770Z.