CEN16LA379 · Cessna 172S
Air Associates of Missouri Cessna 172S · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From Spirit of St Louis Airport (SUS) to Spirit of St Louis Airport (SUS)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16LA379
- 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 172S
- 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
- N52265
- Operator
- Air Associates of Missouri
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Spirit of St Louis Airport (SUS), Chesterfield, MOTo Spirit of St Louis Airport (SUS), Chesterfield, MO
- Aircraft age
- About 7 years (built 2009)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot was performing a night visual approach for landing. A witness on the ground, who was a flight instructor, stated that the airplane's approach was "very unstable" and "erratic," and that the airplane's nose pitched up and down as the pilot made "large power adjustments." He stated that the airplane then began a go-around, which he also described as "unstable." The airplane subsequently descended and impacted terrain. Examination of the airplane revealed no mechanical anomalies that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot's unstable approach and subsequent loss of airplane control during an attempted go-around.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16LA379
- Event ID
- 20160921X92409
- Case number
- CEN16LA379
- 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 2016-09-19.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 971705fe5827fa4a2f7b8715439a880b10256fc6be28745873071b58f84c7e96; retrieved 2026-09-16T04:17:41.260Z.