CEN25LA332 · Cessna 172 N
Cessna 172 N · Accident: preflight or dispatch event before flight
From USAF Academy Airfield (KAFF) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN25LA332
- 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 172 N
- 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
- N1401E
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From USAF Academy Airfield (KAFF), USAF Academy, COTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 47 years (built 1978)
- 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
- Prior to flight
- 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
- Preflight or dispatch event
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot departed on a solo flight, and after takeoff, he saw the airplane’s wheel chocks hanging on the right wing strut. Due to the proximity of the chocks to the wing flaps, a no-flap landing was performed. The airplane landed without further incident. A postaccident examination of the airplane revealed the underside of the right wing had been struck numerous times by the wheel chocks which resulted in substantial damage to a wing rib. The flight school allowed for the storage of wheel chocks on the wing struts, then relying on the pilot to stow them inside the airplane during the preflight inspection. Following the accident, the flight school manager prohibited this practice and the chocks would be stowed inside the airplane when not in use.
Probable cause
The student pilot’s failure to perform an adequate preflight inspection.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN25LA332
- Event ID
- 20250821200835
- Case number
- CEN25LA332
- 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: af1dfeb32a9374f68208b5dd9bcc71d38de3fb745854fadc3e49b40a2fda4ac0; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:14:50.340Z.