ERA16LA224 · Cessna 172P P
Cessna 172P P · Accident: aerodynamic stall/spin during takeoff
From Cherry Ridge Airport (N30) to Morristown Municipal Airport (MMU)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA16LA224
- 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 172P P
- 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
- N54285
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cherry Ridge Airport (N30), Honesdale, PATo Morristown Municipal Airport (MMU), Morristown, NJ
- Aircraft age
- About 35 years (built 1981)
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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
- Aerodynamic stall/spin
- 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 › Task performance
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 the airplane was loaded near its maximum allowable gross weight before departure from the airport. The calculated density altitude was 3,297 ft mean sea level. The pilot stated that, after becoming airborne and climbing to 30 to 40 ft above ground level (agl), he "felt that the airplane was not climbing." The pilot subsequently closed the throttle and attempted to land on the remaining runway.
A review of surveillance video showed the wings of the airplane rocking immediately after liftoff at the mid-point of the runway, which was about 3,000 ft long. The video showed that the airplane's pitch attitude increased, but the airplane never climbed more than about 15 ft agl before it fell hard to the runway on all three landing gear, consistent with an aerodynamic stall. The airplane bounced several times, settled onto the runway with about 500 ft remaining, then overran the right side of the runway at the departure end. Performance data from the pilot's operating handbook indicated that, given the conditions present at the time of the accident, the airplane's landing distance was about 610 ft. Postaccident examination revealed substantial damage to the airplane's wings; there was no evidence of any preimpact mechanical anomalies of the airframe or engine. A postaccident engine run also revealed no anomalies.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain adequate airspeed while departing in a heavily loaded airplane at high density altitude, which resulted in the airplane exceeding its critical angle of attack and experiencing an aerodynamic stall, landing hard, and overrunning the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA16LA224
- Event ID
- 20160621X31918
- Case number
- ERA16LA224
- 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: eb893ef566920dd65f7bd36d9989280f285339e81a67967729ebf6a1c1e5b821; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:32:01.250Z.