ERA24LA204 · Cessna 172M
Cessna 172M · Accident: hard landing
From Montgomery County Airpark (GAI) to an unrecorded destination
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA204
- 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
- N1377U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Montgomery County Airpark (GAI), Gaithersburg, MDTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 48 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 · 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
- 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 › Action/decision
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 and the private pilot were practicing a simulated loss of engine power in the airport traffic pattern as part of the private pilot’s flight review. On base leg, the private pilot added 20 degrees of flaps. The flight instructor told the private pilot that he should wait to extend the flaps until he was sure that the airplane would be able to reach the runway, and the private pilot responded that he would be able to reach the runway. The flight instructor did not correct the pilot’s actions and continued with the approach. As the airplane descended on final approach, the airspeed decreased to 60 knots, and the flight instructor realized that the airplane would not be able to reach the runway. A review of airport surveillance video revealed the airplane touched down hard short of the runway surface, bounced, before the engine power increased. The instructor stated that he told the private pilot to go-around, and that the private pilot added full power, carburetor heat, and brought the flaps to 10 degrees. The airplane began to climb, turned to the left, and was in a nose-high pitch attitude. The flight instructor took control of the airplane and attempted to apply remedial control inputs, but they were not effective. The surveillance video showed that after a brief climb low speed climb, the airplane was in a nose-high pitch, left wing low attitude before it descended to ground contact. The airplane subsequently nosed over and the left-wing strut, fuselage, and empennage were substantially damaged. The flight instructor reported there were no preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures of the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to attain a proper touchdown point during a simulated loss of engine power approach, which resulted in a hard landing short of the runway. Also causal was the flight instructor’s delayed remedial action during the approach and subsequent aborted landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA204
- Event ID
- 20240501194193
- Case number
- ERA24LA204
- 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: 03aac0f378b3852577bd5adcc54a5ac1a4092a24f7cb1f32c4311a7f6f87ded1; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:43:35.219Z.