CEN13LA166 · Cessna 172
Cessna 172 · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From Colorado Plains Regional Airport (KAKO) to Akron, CO
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN13LA166
- 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
- 0
- 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
- 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
- N6199E
- Operator
- Shannon Lee Greene
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Colorado Plains Regional Airport (KAKO), Akron, COTo Akron, CO
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Physical
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A law enforcement officer observed the airplane in the airport traffic pattern just after sunset. The officer continued to monitor the movements of the airplane as it flew around the airport and returned to land. After losing sight of the airplane for a moment, the officer observed the airplane in a nose-down attitude on the runway and on fire. According to the pilot’s initial statement, he was flying the final leg of the traffic pattern when the airplane stalled about 10 feet above the runway. The airplane impacted the runway and then caught fire. In a subsequent statement provided by the pilot, he stated that at 10 feet above the ground everything was normal but then the airplane suddenly nosed down and crashed. Such an abrupt loss of altitude is consistent with an aerodynamic stall. The pilot reported no mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
The pilot was taken to the local sheriff’s office where he underwent a breath alcohol test. The reported value was .078 grams of alcohol per 210 liters of breath. Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibit any person from acting or attempting to act as a crewmember of a civil aircraft while having 0.040 grams of alcohol per 210 liters of breath. The level of ethanol measured in this case would have significantly impaired the pilot’s performance.
Probable cause
The pilot’s physical impairment due to alcohol intoxication, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN13LA166
- Event ID
- 20130219X10600
- Case number
- CEN13LA166
- 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 2013-02-17.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 2eac611ef7a2837c5b9a63b292309f1f0e435d9adb34a9438806fda62d8a9219; retrieved 2026-09-15T20:57:38.409Z.