ERA10CA388 · Cessna 177B
Cessna 177B · Accident: runway excursion during takeoff
From Middlebury State Airport (6B0) to Fitchburg Municipal Airport (FIT)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location and departure or destination. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA10CA388
- 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 177B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 177
- 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
- N34641
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route Narrative disagrees
- From Middlebury State Airport (6B0), Middleberry, VTTo Fitchburg Municipal Airport (FIT), Fitchburg, MA
- 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
- Takeoff · rejected takeoff
- 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
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 pilot, he performed a run-up and proceeded to the departure end of the runway. He applied full power and began the takeoff roll. With the airplane about halfway down the runway, the pilot realized that the airplane was not developing as much airspeed as he expected. As the airplane approached the end of the runway, he decided to abort the takeoff. He pulled back the throttle and applied the brakes but the airplane did not slow down quickly enough. The airplane ran off the end of the runway, traveled down an embankment, and came to rest in a marshy area, substantially damaging the forward section of the fuselage. The pilot noted that he had forgotten to set the flaps properly for takeoff. During a postaccident examination of the wreckage, a Federal Aviation Administration inspector found no preexisting mechanical anomalies with the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot’s delayed decision to abort the takeoff.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA10CA388
- Event ID
- 20100801X72656
- Case number
- ERA10CA388
- 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: 51a2bf729fd9991be2523dfd816b643b4b65eff712bab6b5df493238b6ec18db; retrieved 2026-09-15T14:46:56.487Z.