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ERA21LA168 · Cessna 172 M

31 Mar 2021 · Crystal River, FL, United States

Aviation One Cessna 172 M · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing

From Orlando Executive Airport (ORL) to an unrecorded destination

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Event

NTSB case
ERA21LA168
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 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
N13632
Operator
Aviation One
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Orlando Executive Airport (ORL), Orlando, FLTo not recorded
Aircraft age
About 47 years (built 1974)
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
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
  • Personnel issues › Task performance

Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

The student pilot was conducting a solo cross-country training flight, and reported that while touching down on the runway, a gust of wind pushed the airplane to the left. The pilot attempted to compensate by applying right rudder, but it was not effective. The airplane came to rest on the left side of the runway, inverted, and sustained substantial damage to the right wing, empennage, and rudder. The pilot was seriously injured. While the pilot initially reported that he thought there might have been an issue with the airplane’s right rudder not functioning properly, he later stated that the airplane was functioning as designed.

Probable cause

The student pilot’s inadequate compensation for a crosswind during landing, which resulted in a loss of directional control and a runway excursion.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record ERA21LA168
Event ID
20210331102847
Case number
ERA21LA168
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: 0ec7cd01cdd4ee5e054ac00eb8ed55577145c4e37ba9c297957eefa40e3cbd35; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:54:34.277Z.