LAX97FA050 · Mooney M20J
Mooney M20J · Accident: hard landing
From Casa Grande Municipal Airport (CGZ) to Sundsvall-Härnösand Airport (SDL)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's aircraft involved. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX97FA050
- 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
- 3 · 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
Mooney M20J Possible conflict
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N5766K
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Casa Grande Municipal Airport (CGZ), Casa Grande, AZTo Sundsvall-Härnösand Airport (SDL)
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Directional control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Flare, misjudged
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After a straight-in approach, the aircraft landed hard, bounced, banked sharply and veered off the runway. As the engine accelerated and the aircraft began to level off, the aircraft settled, touching down momentarily in a dirt area next to the runway. The aircraft then became airborne and clipped the tail of a parked single engine aircraft and continued until it struck the side of a parked corporate jet. The pilot did not report having monitored the ATIS frequency, nor had the tower operator advised him that the VASI lights were inoperative. The pilot's logbook revealed no entries for the last 2 years; however, associates and family members familiar with the pilot reported that he flew regularly, sometimes on a daily basis. The pilot's recent night experience was not determined.
Probable cause
the pilot misjudged the landing flare and failed to maintain directional control after a hard bounced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX97FA050
- Event ID
- 20001208X07059
- Case number
- LAX97FA050
- 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 1996-11-22.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 2f7981e773aa403c1e52a2249364667d862af4c8dbb04580135595da2217ae87; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:06:29.096Z.