WPR10CA475 · Cessna 172S
Cessna 172S · Accident: hard landing
From San Luis County Regional Airport (KSBP) to Santa Maria, CA
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR10CA475
- 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
- N172CY
- Operator
- Pacific Aerocademy
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From San Luis County Regional Airport (KSBP), San Luis Obispo, CATo Santa Maria, CA
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The solo student pilot reported that he made a 40 minute flight to the destination airport in order to meet a family member for lunch. In order to initiate the landing flare, he pulled back on the control yoke, but the airplane's nose pitched up more than he expected. The pilot stated that he corrected for the higher than expected pitch attitude by pushing forward on the yoke, resulting in the airplane's nose wheel being "dropped" onto the runway surface. After contacting the runway surface, the nose wheel porpoised (bounced) one time before contacting the surface a final time. The pilot was ultimately able to stabilize the airplane by applying back pressure to the control yoke. Although he did not become aware of it until he returned to his initial point of departure, the airplane's nose wheel had struck the runway surface with sufficient force to buckle the lower part of the firewall and the forward portion of the floorboard. The propeller had also come in contact with the runway surface. The pilot reported no mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airplane at the time of the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate flare which resulted in a bounce and hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR10CA475
- Event ID
- 20100928X85552
- Case number
- WPR10CA475
- 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: fcd289d10fb183a303244034081bc3951152ede9f28dba64b920b37fdcdf8569; retrieved 2026-09-15T15:24:20.452Z.