NYC08CA214 · Cessna 172S
Air America Flight Center Cessna 172S · Accident: hard landing
From Daytona Beach International Airport (DAB) to Daytona Beach International Airport (DAB)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC08CA214
- 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 172S
- 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
- N65939
- Operator
- Air America Flight Center
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Daytona Beach International Airport (DAB), Daytona Beach, FLTo Daytona Beach International Airport (DAB), Daytona Beach, FL
- 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
- Defining eventThe 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
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, he was returning to the airport from a local solo flight in a Cessna 172. He reported that air traffic control (ATC) instructed him to enter midfield right downwind for runway 7 right and maintain altitude at 1,500 feet mean sea level (MSL), and that ATC would inform him when to turn base. After flying an "extended downwind," the pilot was told to turn base and begin descending. While on the final leg of the approach, the airplane's altitude was 1,000 feet MSL and airspeed was 105 knots. The pilot "reduced throttle all the way to idle and continued descending rapidly." During the landing flare, the pilot "pitched the nose up a bit too much," but concerned about the amount of runway remaining, he "pitched the nose down too much" to correct. The airplane impacted the runway on the nose landing gear, and bounced "three to four more times" while "drifting" away from the runway centerline. The airplane veered off the runway, where the pilot was able to regain control. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the firewall during the landing. The pilot did not report any abnormalities with the performance or handling of the airplane.
Probable cause
The student pilot's improper flare.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC08CA214
- Event ID
- 20080719X01078
- Case number
- NYC08CA214
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: 782c5d42784e2fb5e4f2b1843dfc05787cdcb84b362478a63349b94e8210b28b; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:55:52.877Z.