NYC96LA120 · Cessna 150L
Cessna 150L · Accident: hard landing
From Lehigh Valley International Airport (ABE) to 2N8
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC96LA120
- 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 150L
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 150
- 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
- N10439
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lehigh Valley International Airport (ABE), Allentown, PATo 2N8
- 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
- Pilot in command › Flare, improper
- Pilot in command › Recovery from bounced landing, improper
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Matawan, NJ, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot returned to Matawan from a solo cross-country flight, and attempted to land on runway 27. On the fourth landing attempt, the airplane touched down hard, bounced twice, and the nose gear collapsed. The student reported that the wind speed had increased by the time she had returned to Matawan. The wind at a nearby airport was reported to be from 140 degrees at 5 knots with gusts to 15 knots. No malfunction of the airplane was reported by the pilot.
Probable cause
the student pilot's improper flare and improper recovery from a bounced landing. The gusty wind condtion was a related factor.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC96LA120
- Event ID
- 20001208X05863
- Case number
- NYC96LA120
- 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: 9659a3987d2d5db7ae7aaa2ade8dfca82f08639eb9a06b2d45e05672bbd8bc62; retrieved 2026-09-22T22:27:15.524Z.