CEN14CA457 · Cessna 172N N
Cessna 172N N · Accident: hard landing
From an unrecorded airport to Southern Illinois Airport (MDH)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN14CA457
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
- Unknown
Cessna 172N 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
- N737SY
- Operator
- Flightline
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Southern Illinois Airport (MDH), Murphysboro, IL
- Aircraft age
- About 37 years (built 1977)
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to a written statement from maintenance personnel, a pilot discovered the airplane's nose wheel at an "unusual angle" during a preflight inspection. The pilot reported the damage to the fixed based operator (FBO) who asked maintenance to examine the airplane. Examination of the airplane revealed damage to the nose wheel and underside of the fuselage aft of the main landing gear, and substantial damage to the rudder. The FBO contacted the certificated flight instructors and pilots of the three flights that occurred preceding the damage report. The first and third flights were airplane checkout flights with the flight instructor; the second flight was a personal flight conducted by a senior flight instructor. Written statements provided to the FBO from the two flight instructors of those flights failed to reveal who was responsible for the damage, when or where it occurred, or how it was caused. Also unknown, is why the flight instructors did not observe the damage prior to their respective flights.
Probable cause
A hard landing by person(s) unknown.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN14CA457
- Event ID
- 20140827X54327
- Case number
- CEN14CA457
- 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 UTC date the NTSB stores; the local time zone is not recorded, so the local date may differ by a day.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 5cb44f71fb2baa90d6c28135e24a145266dd7659e6f53ce2fe61418c9b8752a5; retrieved 2026-09-16T01:41:14.773Z.