CEN22LA173 · Cessna 172M
The Flight School Cessna 172M · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN22LA173
- 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 172M
- 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
- N1141U
- Operator
- Flight School
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 46 years (built 1976)
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that the purpose of the flight was to gain experience operating the airplane in crosswind conditions. During landing, when the airplane was about 20 feet above the ground, a wind gust arrested the descent and pushed the airplane to the right of the runway centerline. The pilot corrected for the drift and re-established alignment with the runway centerline. When the airplane was a few feet above the runway, another wind gust resulted in the airplane contacting the runway with the left main landing gear. The pilot corrected with right rudder, but the side loading of the landing gear had altered the airplane’s runway alignment to the left and it went off the left side of the runway. The pilot attempted to correct with right rudder and right braking, but the nose wheel sunk into wet ground and the airplane nosed over, coming to rest inverted. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the right wing. The pilot indicated that there were no mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operations. The pilot reported that the wind condition at the time of the landing was about 50 degrees left of runway heading at 13 kts gusting to 23 kts. The recorded weather observation about the time of the accident recorded wind about 20 degrees left of runway heading at 8 kts, gusting to 21 kts.
Probable cause
The pilot did not maintain directional control during landing, which led to a runway excursion and nose-over of the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN22LA173
- Event ID
- 20220411104931
- Case number
- CEN22LA173
- 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: a3016b6e68bcbef4197cd43f05817a8d53d207e333f1cc78a7bc59dc38e6fa68; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:07:35.329Z.