NYC95LA154 · Mooney M20J
Mooney M20J · Accident: hard landing
From Muñoz Landing Airstrip (BLM) to an unrecorded destination
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's aircraft involved. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC95LA154
- 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
Mooney M20J Possible conflict
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N43JA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Muñoz Landing Airstrip (BLM)To not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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
- First occurrenceThe 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
- Dual student › Directional control, not maintained
- Dual student › Flare, misjudged
- Dual student › Recovery from bounced landing, improper
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Supervision, inadequate
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Belmar, NJ, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The dual student pilot was receiving a recurrency checkout from a certified flight instructor. The student held a commercial certificate with 1352 hours of total time, including 350 hours in type. The student reportedly had not flown in about 11 months. They were doing the third touch and go landing, when the airplane went off the left side of the runway, struck a parked airplane, and came to rest on an embankment. According to the instructor, the airplane was in a nose high attitude when it bounced on landing. Engine power was applied to lower the nose, but the airplane swerved left and exited the runway. Examination of the airplane revealed the elevator trim was in the full nose-up position.
Probable cause
The student pilot's (1) misjudged flare (2) inadequate recovery from a bounced landing (3) failure to maintain directional control and the certified flight instructor's inadequate supervision.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC95LA154
- Event ID
- 20001207X04058
- Case number
- NYC95LA154
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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. 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: 6ea26ab962f54f07c91c8972daabd3cc7ec17da664b107b5bf205ec59798039c; retrieved 2026-09-22T23:38:56.340Z.