This paper is divided in two parts. In the first part we study a second order neutral partial differential equation with state dependent delay and noninstantaneous impulses. The conditions for existence and uniqueness of the mild solution are investigated via Hausdorff measure of noncompactness and Darbo Sadovskii fixed point theorem. Thus we remove the need to assume the compactness assumption on the associated family of operators. The conditions for approximate controllability are investigated for the neutral second order system with respect to the approximate controllability of the corresponding linear system in a Hilbert space. A simple range condition is used to prove approximate controllability. Thereby, we remove the need to assume the invertibility of a controllability operator used by authors in (Balachandran and Park, 2003), which fails to exist in infinite dimensional spaces if the associated semigroup is compact. Our approach also removes the need to check the invertibility of the controllability Gramian operator and associated limit condition used by the authors in (Dauer and Mahmudov, 2002), which are practically difficult to verify and apply. Examples are provided to illustrate the presented theory.