LAX96LA234 · Burkhart Grob G102
Burkhart Grob G102 · Accident: forced landing during an emergency descent
From L01 · LLANO, CA to Mesquite Airport (67L)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96LA234
- 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
- 1 · 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
- N154SS
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From L01 · LLANO, CATo Mesquite Airport (67L), NV
- 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
- Emergency descent
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, improper
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Mesquite, NV, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The pilot and 11 other glider pilots planned to fly nonstop on a 500 kilometer flight from their point of departure, after an aero tow to 7,000 feet mean sea level. No communication difficulties or control problems were reported during periodic radio contacts between the glider pilot and the ground crew. En route, some of the glider pilots experienced turbulence and occasional downdrafts. Subsequently, the glider collided with rough terrain near a ridge line. There were no witnesses to the accident. The pilot's son indicated that his father was apparently unable to locate sufficient lift to continue his flight for an additional 11 miles to the destination airport.
Probable cause
improper in-flight planning/decision by the pilot, which resulted in his being forced to land in an area with unsuitable terrain. Factors relating to the accident were: the lack of available (thermal) lift, downdraft(s), and the resultant lack of suitable terrain for an off-airport (emergency) landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96LA234
- Event ID
- 20001208X06035
- Case number
- LAX96LA234
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1996-06-16.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 71b286cf018246340d202368c4d42e54acc75ca37a52205fcc415a2b542d56bf; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:19:52.655Z.