LAX96LA337 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: on ground/water collision with terrain/water during takeoff
From an unrecorded airport to Prescott Regional Airport - Ernest A. Love Field (PRC)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96LA337
- 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
- N5120H
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Prescott Regional Airport - Ernest A. Love Field (PRC), Prescott, AZ
- 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
- Takeoff · rejected takeoff
- 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
- On ground/water collision with terrain/water
- 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 › Operation with known deficiencies in equipment, attempted
- Pilot in command › Proper alignment, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was beginning a night VFR flight, and only 9 percent of the moon was illuminated. The pilot knew that the runway lights were inoperative. During the takeoff roll, the airplane's landing light failed, and the pilot aborted the takeoff. The pilot was unable to maintain runway alignment, and the airplane went off the left side of the runway. The airplane then encountered soft terrain, and the nose landing gear collapsed.
Probable cause
the pilot's decision to attempt a takeoff with the runway lights inoperative, and his failure to maintain runway alignment during an aborted takeoff, after failure of the landing light. Factors relating to the accident were: darkness, inoperative runway lights, failure of the landing light, and the encounter with soft terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96LA337
- Event ID
- 20001208X06776
- Case number
- LAX96LA337
- 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 1996-09-16.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 7a5b15efe3e2f7315b4089f2bee92b74b4f6ba48016c964912f1ed64684fcfd9; retrieved 2026-09-22T21:08:31.168Z.