LAX96LA135 · Burkhart Grob G102
Burkhart Grob G102 · Accident: forced landing on approach
From Minden-Tahoe Airport (MEV) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96LA135
- 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
Burkhart Grob G102
- Aircraft type
- Grob G102
- Category
- Glider
- 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
- N851BG
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Minden-Tahoe Airport (MEV)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
- Approach
- 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
- Forced 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
- Pilot in command › Distance/altitude, misjudged
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that he received a weather briefing which indicated the possibility of ridge lift. Following a normal takeoff and climb, he released from the tow plane, when the glider was at about 7,000 feet mean sea level (msl), 4 miles from the 4,718 foot msl airport, and 2 miles from the ridge. The pilot further reported that he encountered some ridge lift, but experienced a fairly substantial sink rate by the time he had descended to 6,200 feet msl. The rate of sink increased, and he realized that he was not high enough to return to the airport. The pilot made a forced landing in a soft, muddy dirt field, about 0.25 mile from the airport. During rollout, the glider collided with a dirt berm.
Probable cause
the pilot's misjudgment of distance and altitude from the airport, which resulted in an off-airport forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96LA135
- Event ID
- 20001208X05428
- Case number
- LAX96LA135
- 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: db523222aa3cd2119cefc9d4ff162b1737874f3825ab50ab1482bb71280486bb; retrieved 2026-09-22T22:44:35.776Z.