WPR25LA061 · Cessna 172M
Cessna 172M · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing
From Tacoma Narrows Airport (TIW) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR25LA061
- 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
- N6750H
- Operator
- Pickett Michael R
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tacoma Narrows Airport (TIW), Gig Harbor, WATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 49 years (built 1975)
- 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 student pilot reported that he had been performing touch-and-goes and had landed left of the runway centerline. When he advanced the throttle, the aircraft “immediately pulled hard left due to its left-turning tendency,” and exited the left side of the runway. The student pilot attempted to continue the takeoff in an effort to overfly a sign, however the airplane’s landing gear impacted the top of the sign. The airplane then settled back onto terrain next to the runway, and the nose gear collapsed. As a result, the airplane sustained substantial damage to the forward fuselage. At the time of the accident, the pilot was taking off on runway 17 with wind 060° at 4 knots. The student pilot reported that there were no preaccident mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The student pilot’s failure to maintain directional control during a touch-and-go.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR25LA061
- Event ID
- 20241216199428
- Case number
- WPR25LA061
- 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: 3d0b92f2e49486362aa7e1e1961818fb7ce7a88852644011c73b876d5dc9d76c; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:32:43.816Z.