ERA14LA448 · Cessna 172M M
Apopka Aviation & Flight Services Cessna 172M M · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing
From Orlando Apopka Airport (X04) to Leesburg International Airport (LEE)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA14LA448
- 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 172M M
- 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
- N13394
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Orlando Apopka Airport (X04), Apopka, FLTo Leesburg International Airport (LEE), Leesburg, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 41 years (built 1973)
- 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 · landing roll
- 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 on ground
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and student pilot were conducting practice touch-and-go takeoffs and landings in the airport traffic pattern. The instructor stated that the runway was wet from rain earlier in the day. During the fifth landing, the student landed the airplane right of the runway centerline. The flight instructor described the landing as "soft" and "slow." The student applied left rudder to steer the airplane back toward the centerline, but the airplane continued to drift left. The flight instructor stated that he took the flight controls, applied left rudder, and then applied left brake, but the airplane "did not respond." The airplane subsequently ran off the left side of the runway, impacted a sign, and came to rest upright about 250 ft past the runway edge. The left main landing gear collapsed, and the firewall sustained substantial damage. Postaccident examination of the landing gear, wheels, brakes, rudder controls, and nosewheel steering revealed no anomalies.
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s delayed remedial action and his subsequent loss of directional control during landing on a wet runway for reasons that could not be determined because postaccident examination of the airplane revealed no anomalies.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA14LA448
- Event ID
- 20140922X30733
- Case number
- ERA14LA448
- 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: 94c5d74c6d917a78e7944a09d40fb4ef17a021eded933e2510e1f02ba0b075cb; retrieved 2026-09-16T01:46:55.340Z.