MIA96LA213 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: hard landing
From Palm Beach County Park Airport (LNA) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA96LA213
- 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 152
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 152
- 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
- N89405
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Palm Beach County Park Airport (LNA)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
- Pilot in command › Flare, misjudged
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight had landed on runway 15. An FAA inspector, at the airport at the time, saw the airplane on the runway with the 'nose wheel collapsed.' According to his statement, '...the nose wheel was driven into the lower cowling with enough force to lock the control yoke in the full up position...[and] there appeared to be considerable wrinkling of the external skin on the fuselage and the wings.' The pilot stated, all he could remember was, when he lowered the nose, the airplane touched down nose first on the runway. The FAA inspector stated; '...I feel that it required extremely hard ground contact to cause the amount of damage that the aircraft sustained. Inspection of the runway surface showed that an initial heavy nose wheel strike occurred in the center of runways 15 and 21, followed by one prop strike indentation in the runway about 15 feet later, and then skid marks indicating that the nose wheel had collapsed and was sliding sideways.' The airplane came to rest on the right side of the runway, about 250 feet from the point of initial impact.
Probable cause
the pilot misjudged the flare, resulting in a hard landing, and the nose gear collapsing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA96LA213
- Event ID
- 20001208X06582
- Case number
- MIA96LA213
- 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: 8c1e95368143d5037224b1fe12e912d2ea6bb23e9f3f8ec7f7d766c4213b14ec; retrieved 2026-09-22T21:28:43.271Z.