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CEN11CA018 · Cessna 172M

31 Jul 2010 · Newton, KS, United States

River City Flying Club Cessna 172M · Accident: hard landing

From Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport (ICT) to Newton City-County Airport (EWK)

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Event

NTSB case
CEN11CA018
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 172M

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
N13013
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport (ICT), Wichita, KSTo Newton City-County Airport (EWK), Newton, KS
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

  • Personnel issues › Task performance

Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

Following a 25 nautical mile cross-country night flight, the private pilot performed a full stop landing. The pilot then departed and stayed in the airport traffic pattern for a second landing. During touchdown, the airplane impacted the runway hard and bounced back into the air before settling back on the runway. One of the two passengers reported hurting her back during the hard landing so the pilot taxied to and shut down the airplane at the airport’s fixed base of operations. After examining the airplane for damage and finding none, the pilot elected to depart with his passengers and successfully flew back to their originating airport. Approximately three months later during the airplane’s annual inspection, the engine firewall was found to be damaged. The pilot later reported that there were no malfunctions or defects with the airplane’s flight controls that contributed to the hard landing.

Probable cause

The pilot’s inadequate flare, which resulted in a hard landing.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record CEN11CA018
Event ID
20101014X55320
Case number
CEN11CA018
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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
  • The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2010-08-01.
  • API snapshot SHA-256: 7742632565a4b5a9c04ce9525f27cfcadc949713688e5d1a770fd2ab2090a7b1; retrieved 2026-09-15T15:28:50.843Z.