ERA21LA282 · Cessna 172S
Moyer Aviation Cessna 172S · Accident: runway excursion during landing
From Wilkes Barre Wyoming Valley Airport (WBW) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA21LA282
- 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 172S
- 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
- N5185U
- Operator
- Moyer Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Wilkes Barre Wyoming Valley Airport (WBW), Wilkes-Barre, PATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 19 years (built 2002)
- 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
- Runway excursion
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot completed the approach to her home airport with a right crosswind correction applied. She explained that the right main landing gear touched down first, the airplane bounced, and the airplane yawed to its left. The pilot said the airplane did not respond to her control inputs to realign with the landing runway, and that she did not abort the landing after the runway excursion because there were trees to the airplane’s immediate front.
The airplane came to rest upright in the grass apron on the runway’s left side. The pilot was unhurt, and the airplane sustained substantial damage to the firewall and nose landing gear mount structure. The damage to the structure was consistent with an aerodynamic stall and hard landing on the nose landing gear. A post-accident examination of the airplane by an FAA aviation safety inspector revealed flight control continuity from the flight controls to all flight control surfaces.
Probable cause
The pilot’s loss of aircraft control following a bounced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA21LA282
- Event ID
- 20210710103449
- Case number
- ERA21LA282
- 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, 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: a3bab5980fb9dba4527f225096f312aabadedfbb314ec3426af8e138a91b3f81; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:16:33.017Z.