CEN23LA275 · Cessna 180A
Cessna 180A · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing
From Grand Prairie Municipal Airport (KGPM) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN23LA275
- 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 180A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 180
- 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
- N889SL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Grand Prairie Municipal Airport (KGPM), Grand Prairie, TXTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 65 years (built 1958)
- 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 executed a wheel landing but before the tail wheel settled onto the runway, the airplane drifted to the right after encountering an unexpected wind shift. His efforts to maintain control were not successful. The airplane subsequently exited the runway and traversed across the grass towards a retention pond. In an attempt to stop the airplane before the pond, the pilot applied heavy braking, and the airplane nosed over and came to rest inverted. The vertical stabilizer, rudder, left wing and lift strut sustained substantial damage. The pilot reported that there were no preaccident mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. He added that transitioning the tail wheel down onto the runway sooner instead of expediting his exit from the runway, he may have been able to maintain directional control during the wind shift.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to maintain directional control during landing. Contributing to the accident was the unexpected sudden wind shift.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN23LA275
- Event ID
- 20230705192530
- Case number
- CEN23LA275
- 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: e6639c368beec9bf6915ff7b11f0bf955bd4a896a82be94f5a3fad685dc0ed9a; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:48:35.124Z.