ERA25LA087 · Cessna 172K
Cessna 172K · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA25LA087
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna 172K
- 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
- N7085G
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 55 years (built 1969)
- 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
- En route · cruise
- 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 in flight
- 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 structures
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The instrument training flight was conducted in instrument meteorological conditions. The private pilot receiving instruction said that he initiated a “slight turn to the left which spatially disoriented me. We ended up in a spiral, and then my instructor took over and recovered [the airplane].” The flight instructor gave a similar account and stated that he “allowed the situation to deteriorate too far before taking control.” After landing, a visual inspection of the airplane revealed substantial damage in the form of “plastic deformation” to both wings consistent with overstress. The flight instructor reported that prior to the accident the airplane required a “1-3 degree” input in the roll axis to maintain the desired heading. When the flight instructor was asked if he felt the discrepancy was significant enough to declare an emergency, abort the mission, or perform a precautionary landing, and he replied, “No. We noticed it and briefed it, but no. It was noticed, but not a grounding condition.”
Probable cause
The pilot’s loss of aircraft control due to spatial disorientation, and the flight instructor’s inadequate supervision, which resulted in the subsequent overstress of the airplane during recovery.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA25LA087
- Event ID
- 20241231199495
- Case number
- ERA25LA087
- 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: 360f0802a9c8252d3f1e5c91717e4dd135ba74a4e2782db4c97b8ff038bbb638; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:34:26.298Z.