GAA16LA001 · Cessna 172B B
Cessna 172B B · Accident: runway excursion during landing
From Sutter County Airport (O52) to Benton Field (O85)
Event
- NTSB case
- GAA16LA001
- 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 172B B
- 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
- N7837X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sutter County Airport (O52), Yuba City, CATo Benton Field (O85), Redding, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 54 years (built 1961)
- 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 · aborted after 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
- Runway excursion
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot reported that, while landing after a cross-country flight, the landing roll seemed "fast" even though the airplane touched down "not far" past the runway numbers. The pilot determined that he would not be able to stop the airplane on the remaining runway, so he applied full power and aborted the landing. The airplane was in ground effect as it passed over the departure end of the runway. The pilot thought that the airplane was not going to clear the tree line in its flightpath, so he maneuvered the airplane to land on a dirt road. During the landing roll, the left wing impacted a barbed wire fence. The pilot reported that, during the initial landing, he "landed with a stiff tailwind on a short runway." The pilot reported that there were no preimpact mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airframe or engine that would have precluded normal operation.
During the accident, the passenger seated in the front right seat was ejected from the airplane and sustained a serious injury. According to the pilot, the passenger's seat had been in the "full rearward" position, which placed the lap belt attachment points about "mid-thigh" and probably did not allow the shoulder harness to be "tightened securely."
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper decision to land the airplane on a short runway with a tailwind and his subsequent delayed decision to abort the landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record GAA16LA001
- Event ID
- 20151006X32623
- Case number
- GAA16LA001
- 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, coordinates. 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: ed27aaa28cfddfa1b33334f6a32bc6541d8fe5a0eb53f4ac03bbb220d28fbbaa; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:51:39.240Z.