WPR23LA315 · Cessna 172M
Cessna 172M · Accident: runway excursion during takeoff
From Auburn Municipal Airport (KAUN) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR23LA315
- 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
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- 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
- N20268
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Auburn Municipal Airport (KAUN), Auburn, CATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 51 years (built 1972)
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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 › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor reported that during an instructional flight, he was conducting a high-speed taxi exercise on the runway with a student pilot, to work on rudder control. He instructed the student to remain at or below 50 mph and that they would begin slowing the airplane about 1,000 ft from the departure end of the runway. About halfway down the length of the runway, the instructor noticed that the airspeed seemed high, and he informed the student that they needed to decrease the airplane’s speed; however, the airplane continued to accelerate. When the instructor told the student to begin their deceleration, the airplane did not decelerate as expected. As the airplane overran the runway, the instructor took the flight controls and elected to take off. The airplane was flown to the originating airport, where substantial damage to the horizontal stabilizer and elevator was discovered during postflight inspection, which resulted from impact with a runway end light during the runway excursion. The instructor reported that there were no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s failure to monitor the airplane’s speed during a high-speed taxi, resulting in a runway excursion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR23LA315
- Event ID
- 20230814192871
- Case number
- WPR23LA315
- 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: 7dc5e035650a781e489fdef806a9a8aff5e7fe50ea27ca9c28ca97ad56ca0222; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:00:17.180Z.