ERA12CA553 · Cessna 182T
Civil Air Patrol Cessna 182T · Accident: hard landing
From Columbia Metropolitan Airport (CAE) to Marion County Airport (MAO)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12CA553
- 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 182T
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N635CP
- Operator
- Civil Air Patrol
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Columbia Metropolitan Airport (CAE), Columbia, SCTo Marion County Airport (MAO), Marion, SC
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
As the airplane arrived in the area of the destination airport, where the pilots would commence a Civil Air Patrol, U.S Air Force-assigned mission, the pilot flying (a flight instructor in the left seat) asked the pilot-not-flying (a private pilot in the right seat) if he wanted to practice takeoffs and landings. The flight instructor turned over the controls to the private pilot, and he performed a normal landing. The private pilot then took off to practice a short-field landing. Both pilots reported the airplane touched down "firm" on the main landing gear, and as the airplane decelerated, it felt as if the airplane had a flat tire. Shortly after, the propeller began to strike the runway. A postaccident examination of the airplane revealed damage to the nose landing gear attachment assembly and substantial damage to the firewall. During postaccident interviews, neither pilot could recall the airspeed during the approach or the flap configuration. The flight instructor described the landing flare as a "momentary or short flare."
Probable cause
The pilot's improper landing flare, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12CA553
- Event ID
- 20120910X34719
- Case number
- ERA12CA553
- 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: 874c43b50d7e415665a0b0b05b68f08ed521329c54d138001f119303d3892cab; retrieved 2026-09-15T19:47:50.813Z.