ERA21LA119 · Cessna 172R
Aeroventures Flying Club Cessna 172R · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing
From Greenville Downtown Airport (GMU) to Gwinnett County Briscoe Field (LZU)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA21LA119
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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 172R
- 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
- N997MC
- Operator
- Aeroventures Flying Club
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Greenville Downtown Airport (GMU), Greenville, SCTo Gwinnett County Briscoe Field (LZU), Lawrenceville, GA
- Aircraft age
- About 24 years (built 1997)
- 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
- Loss of control on ground
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was returning to his home airport after a short trip. Other than mild turbulence, there was nothing eventful about the trip. Upon nearing the airport and listening to the weather, he understood that winds were gusting from the northwest at 12 to 20 knots. This was on the high end of his personal minimums, but within the tolerance range that he had flown in the past. As he was preparing to land, he experienced some greater turbulence and crosswinds. The air traffic controller in the control tower gave him a straight in approach, and subsequently cleared him to land on runway 25. The approach was turbulent, and the plane was being bounced and pushed left intermittently. Due to the wind gust advisory, he landed with only 10°of flaps and about 10 knots more airspeed. His estimated speed over the threshold of the runway was about 70 knots. He stated that it was pretty gusty crossing the runway threshold. He landed the airplane and once the nosewheel was down, he started braking. Unexpectedly the plane moved to the left quickly. It seemed to him as though a large gust hit the airplane from the northwest side and pushed the airplane sharply to the left. He worked to counter the movement with right rudder but was unsuccessful in stopping the momentum. He nearly kept the airplane on the pavement, but the left tire just slipped off the edge of the runway. When the left tire contacted the newly sodded turf, combined with the recent heavy rain; the tire sunk quickly, as the turf was soft and very muddy. This rapid deceleration, and the left tire being off the pavement, caused the rear of the plane to “rise” and the propeller struck the runway. With this motion, and the left tire being below the pavement, the airplane pivoted to the left, and the left-wing tip struck the surface. The airplane came to rest on its landing gear, just off the runway surface.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain directional control during landing in a gusting crosswind, which resulted in a loss of control and runway excursion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA21LA119
- Event ID
- 20210128102571
- Case number
- ERA21LA119
- 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, 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: ca945e7734c2c045ecbf4f70cb2ae53896b698cabaf2e3fee99624367003ee40; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:35:02.429Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: departure. GMU is Greenville Downtown Airport in Greenville, SC. Lawrenceville, GA is the destination airport LZU (Gwinnett County), and the narrative says the pilot was returning to his home airport after a trip, so the departure city label is wrong.