CEN19LA302 · Cessna 172 S
Brazos Valley Flight Services Cessna 172 S · Accident: hard landing
From Easterwood Field (CLL) to Fayette Regional Air Center Airport (3T5)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN19LA302
- 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 S
- 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
- N212BS
- Operator
- Brazos Valley Flight Services
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Easterwood Field (CLL), College Station, TXTo Fayette Regional Air Center Airport (3T5), La Grange, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 20 years (built 1999)
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 student pilot was conducting a solo cross-country flight. Upon arriving at the destination airport, he overflew the runway to determine the wind direction from the windsock then performed a normal approach. He stated that, during the landing flare, a gust of wind came from the right side and lifted the airplane. The airplane then landed hard, bounced once, then came to a stop, resulting in substantial damage to the firewall and a collapsed nose landing gear. Review of the wind conditions revealed a light right crosswind around the time of the accident. The pilot reported there were no mechanical malfunctions or anomalies with the airplane. The circumstances of the accident are consistent with an improper flare and hard landing.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper flare, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN19LA302
- Event ID
- 20190903X83852
- Case number
- CEN19LA302
- 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: 5cc883bd3e549cba784ca8d71621ad71d4b24ebd355df32281f197d73176c72d; retrieved 2026-09-16T09:57:47.586Z.