ERA11LA489 · Cessna 172N
Alpha One Flight Service Cessna 172N · Accident: hard landing
From Plymouth Municipal Airport (PYM) to Plymouth Municipal Airport (PYM)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA11LA489
- 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
- N739RU
- Operator
- Alpha One Flight Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Plymouth Municipal Airport (PYM), Plymouth, MATo Plymouth Municipal Airport (PYM), Plymouth, 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
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that the intent of the flight was to perform practice takeoffs and landings. During the first takeoff roll, she noticed that the control column required forward pressure to prevent the airplane from prematurely rotating. The pilot further reported that she was not concerned about the controllability of the airplane, elected not to abort the takeoff, and continued around the traffic pattern. During the landing flare, she was unable to pull back on the control column, and the airplane bounced several times. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed no evidence of any discrepancies that would have interfered with movement of the control column or operation of the elevator and elevator trim controls. Additionally, the operator reported that there were no mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal flight operations of the airplane. It is likely that the pilot did not arrest the airplane’s descent rate, resulting in a bounced landing, and then allowed the airplane to porpoise.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate flare and improper recovery from a bounced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA11LA489
- Event ID
- 20110914X90042
- Case number
- ERA11LA489
- 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: efaec5a844b56e7c3f6dd42dec94837347315c04c3f43c5635e5117f9d804f99; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:44:19.692Z.