ERA10CA381 · Cessna 172N
Cessna 172N · Accident: runway excursion during landing
From Limington Harmon Airport (63B) to Stonington Municipal Airport (93B)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA10CA381
- 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 172N
- 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
- N6410F
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Limington Harmon Airport (63B), Limington, METo Stonington Municipal Airport (93B), Stonington, ME
- 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
- 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
- Runway excursion
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, as he flared the airplane for a crosswind landing to runway 25, he encountered a gust of wind. The airplane bounced once on the runway and veered left and right several times before the pilot was "unable to redirect the aircraft back" as it veered off the right side of the runway, into grass which sloped down to a drainage ditch. The pilot attempted to recover the airplane for "several hundred feet," before the right main landing gear got caught in higher grass and mud, resulting in substantial damage to the fuselage. The pilot reported that there were no mechanical anomalies with the airplane. He further reported 888 hours of total flight time, including 857 hours in the make and model of the accident airplane. A weather report issued around the time of the accident, at an airport about 19 miles to the southwest, included winds from 290 at 12 knots, gusting to 15 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain directional control during a crosswind landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA10CA381
- Event ID
- 20100729X84620
- Case number
- ERA10CA381
- 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. 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: 7f80d864b2ac720d96251ac9c541ad1f68e13823f7ac2adc4be3922fb3c8aa63; retrieved 2026-09-15T14:46:28.376Z.