WPR12CA375 · Cessna 172 N
Silverwing Flight Services Cessna 172 N · Accident: wildlife encounter (non-bird) during landing
From Sandpoint Airport (SZT) to Sandpoint Airport (SZT)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR12CA375
- 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 172 N
- 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
- N3082E
- Operator
- Silverwing Flight Services
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sandpoint Airport (SZT), Sand Point, IDTo Sandpoint Airport (SZT), Sand Point, ID
- 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
- Wildlife encounter (non-bird)
- 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
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and the student pilot had conducted a night visual flight rules instructional flight and were returning to their home base, a nontower-controlled airport. The student pilot set the airplane up for landing, and, according to the flight instructor, they looked carefully but did not see any wildlife on or near the runway throughout the approach and flare. However, during the flare, a deer ran onto the left side of the runway and collided with the airplane’s left horizontal stabilizer. The pilots maintained control of the airplane, and the subsequent touchdown and landing roll were uneventful. The airplane’s stabilizer was substantially damaged. According to the flight instructor, this was the third deer strike at that airport in as many years. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Airport/Facility Directory stated that wildlife was present on and in the vicinity of the airport, and the flight instructor reported that a similar message was normally contained in the airport's automated weather observing system radio broadcast. Postaccident discussions with the airport manager and FAA personnel revealed that deer are a known problem at the airport, and that efforts are underway to approve, fund, and install an airport perimeter fence no sooner than fall 2014. Discussions with United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Management Division personnel revealed that the agency’s local office was willing and able to provide direct technical assistance to the airport to explore and implement deer hazard mitigation strategies in the interim.
Probable cause
A deer strike during the landing flare. Contributing to the accident was the airport’s lack of any deer incursion prevention measures, such as an airport perimeter fence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR12CA375
- Event ID
- 20120829X74215
- Case number
- WPR12CA375
- 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 2012-08-28.
- API snapshot SHA-256: bb9ce5de018486a9c6c9fe9e109cf2bcdd8316f1dca48a00740b223f4b437306; retrieved 2026-09-15T19:34:16.906Z.