ANC18LA014 · Cessna 172
Cessna 172 · Accident: loss of visual reference during landing
From Miami Executive Airport (TMB) to Miami Executive Airport (TMB)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC18LA014
- 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 172
- 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
- N537HF
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Miami Executive Airport (TMB), Miami, FLTo Miami Executive Airport (TMB), Miami, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 17 years (built 2000)
- 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
- 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 visual reference
- 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
The private pilot indicated that after being cleared to land on the runway at the towered airport, he heard the controller state that the tower was closing. The pilot stated that, after turning onto the final segment of the traffic pattern and seeing the runway numbers, the runway lights extinguished. The pilot lost sight of the runway but continued to land. The airplane landed in the grass south of the east/west runway and impacted a taxiway light, which resulted in substantial damage to the left wing and lift strut.
A review of the airfield lighting logs showed the lights were on at the time of the accident and transitioned to pilot-controlled lighting about 5 minutes after the accident. Further, archived radar data indicated that the airplane's last radar target appeared before the lights extinguished, which would indicate that the lights were on at the time of the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to continue the landing after a loss of visual cues during a night landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC18LA014
- Event ID
- 20171201X95313
- Case number
- ANC18LA014
- 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 2017-12-01.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 1dff651f8e5d525e1cb82fb6744bd8f523430704334ad1d3c3b7d0c3a6704b65; retrieved 2026-09-16T06:03:31.362Z.