ERA18LA257 · Cessna 172 Undesignat
Cessna 172 Undesignat · Accident: landing area overshoot
From Winter Haven Regional Airport - Gilbert Field (GIF) to Winter Haven Regional Airport - Gilbert Field (GIF)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA18LA257
- 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 Undesignat
- 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
- N6950A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Winter Haven Regional Airport - Gilbert Field (GIF), Winter Haven, FLTo Winter Haven Regional Airport - Gilbert Field (GIF), Winter Haven, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 62 years (built 1956)
- 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
- Landing area overshoot
- 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 student pilot was conducting a supervised solo flight in the airport traffic pattern. Each of the previous two takeoff and landings were uneventful. During the initial climb on the third takeoff, the student observed the airspeed rapidly decrease. He declared an emergency, lowered the nose, and turned the airplane 180° to land on the runway. The airplane overran the end of the runway and impacted a fence, resulting in substantial damage to the windshield and left wing. The student’s instructor witnessed the takeoff and stated that the airplane’s angle of attack was excessively high and that there would have been adequate runway remaining for the student to land straight ahead instead of turning 180°. Postaccident examination of the engine did not reveal any anomalies. It is likely that the student pilot’s excessively nose-high pitch attitude during the takeoff resulted in the observed loss of airspeed.
Probable cause
The student pilot’s improper pitch attitude control during the initial climb, which resulted in a loss of airspeed, and his subsequent decision to conduct a 180° turn following the perceived anomaly, which resulted in a runway overrun.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA18LA257
- Event ID
- 20180924X11517
- Case number
- ERA18LA257
- 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, cause areas. 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: 7fd93c816e86e106bc63ed5ac2197999b72b872e830d58312ac252ab02f329d7; retrieved 2026-09-16T08:16:06.341Z.