ERA18TA266 · Cessna 172 Undesignat
Cessna 172 Undesignat · Accident: nose over/nose down during landing
From Somerset County Airport (2G9) to Somerset County Airport (2G9)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA18TA266
- 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
- N4001F
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Somerset County Airport (2G9), Somerset, PATo Somerset County Airport (2G9), Somerset, PA
- Aircraft age
- About 60 years (built 1958)
- 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 · landing roll
- 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
- Nose over/nose down
- 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the airplane's first flight after an annual inspection, the commercial pilot practiced touch-and-go landings and then flew the airplane for about 1.5 hours before returning to the airport. While on final approach to land, he reduced the engine power. The pilot stated that after the airplane touched down on the runway, it was traveling too fast to stop before the end of the runway but not fast enough to abort the landing. Subsequently, the airplane continued off the end of the runway, down an embankment, and came to rest inverted about 150 ft from the departure end of the runway. Postaccident examination of the brakes revealed no anomalies, and the pilot reported that there were no mechanical malfunctions or failures of the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. The pilot stated that he lands farther down the runway during full-stop landings because his hangar is at the far end of the runway. Thus, it is likely that the pilot landed the airplane too far down the runway and that it was traveling too fast to prevent a runway overrun.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to land with insufficient runway remaining to stop, which resulted in a runway overrun.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA18TA266
- Event ID
- 20181001X90408
- Case number
- ERA18TA266
- 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. 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: 064c6b9c4c36db8f073b90009c564d09ac13bb18f3aa274191482ab6de80cceb; retrieved 2026-09-16T08:17:32.744Z.