ERA20CA318 · Cessna 172 M
Boeing Employees Flying Assn Cessna 172 M · Accident: hard landing
From Cape May County Airport (WWD) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA20CA318
- 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 M
- 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
- N19813
- Operator
- Boeing Employees Flying Assn
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cape May County Airport (WWD), Wildwood, NJTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 48 years (built 1972)
- 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
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot was conducting his first solo cross country flight. During the landing flare at the destination airport, he reduced engine power, and the airplane touched down “firmly” then bounced back into the air. It bounced 3 to 4 more times before it came to rest on the runway. The pilot also stated that “each bounce and touch down were worse …. than the previous.” Subsequently, he taxied the airplane to a hangar and egressed without issue. After the accident, an examination of the airframe found that the fuselage was substantially damaged. The pilot reported no preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The student pilot’s improper landing flare, which resulted in a hard bounced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA20CA318
- Event ID
- 20200915X42025
- Case number
- ERA20CA318
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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: 96065af4e266cda4b7371e4b2d442698196c4d1d92e0b3b9134d464273b09b26; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:02:41.352Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: departure. WWD is Cape May County Airport at Wildwood, NJ; the recorded city name is misspelled.