CEN23LA430 · Cessna 172S
Cessna 172S · Accident: hard landing
From Austin Straubel International Airport (GRB) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN23LA430
- 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
- 0
- 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
- N529ER
- Operator
- Pilotsmith
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Austin Straubel International Airport (GRB), Green Bay, WITo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 21 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
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 student pilot reported that he was conducting a solo cross-country flight and while landing, the nose wheel of the airplane contacted the runway surface hard. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the forward fuselage, firewall, and floorboard areas. The student pilot reported no preaccident mechanical malfunction/failure of the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
In the recommendation section of his submitted NTSB form 6120.1 Pilot/Operator Aircraft Accident/Incident Report, he noted the need to watch [air]speed on landing, control the descent, and avoid pushing down on the yoke.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate landing flare that resulted in a hard landing and impact with the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN23LA430
- Event ID
- 20240301193866
- Case number
- CEN23LA430
- 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: a5eb3732e42a5a7f887e759d637429b7084a9b4392528d4e290b25648f061ed8; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:33:22.587Z.