DFW08CA021 · Cessna 172
Cessna 172 · Accident: hard landing
From Pauls Valley Municipal Airport (PVJ) to Stillwater Regional Airport (SWO)
Event
- NTSB case
- DFW08CA021
- 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 172
- 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
- N5181A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Pauls Valley Municipal Airport (PVJ), Pauls Valley, OKTo Stillwater Regional Airport (SWO), Stillwater, OK
- 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 › 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 28-hour student pilot landed hard and encountered a porpoise while performing a touch-and-go landing on Runway 35. The pilot reported that on this approach, he had been instructed to follow a twin-engine airplane on final approach and he maintained a final approach speed that was 10 knots higher than normal. The airplane landed hard, bounced, and the airplane entered porpoise, touching down several times. During one of the landings, the airplane pivoted enough to allow the propeller to contact the runway. In the completed NTSB Form 6120 provided by the student pilot, he recommended that to prevent further accidents, ATC controllers should not place student pilots between faster aircraft in the traffic pattern, where the student pilots may feel rushed. The pilot also recommended additional training in straight-in approaches. The winds at the time of the mishap were reported from 060 degrees at 3 knots.
Probable cause
The student pilot's improper recovery from a bounced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DFW08CA021
- Event ID
- 20071126X01840
- Case number
- DFW08CA021
- 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: c156e52e3176ff59d43e2b3c0e19f60fc041b41b1e2b888aa8f675fbe97de728; retrieved 2026-09-22T03:18:50.533Z.