NYC97LA042 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: hard landing
From 2N8 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC97LA042
- 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
- N48693
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 2N8To 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, improper
- Pilot in command › Recovery from bounced landing, improper
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Marlboro, NJ, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot landed hard and the nose gear collapsed. According to a witness the airplane touched down and bounced 10 feet into the air. The aircraft then pitched down and hit on the nose, and bounced again, but only about 5 feet up this time. The aircraft again pitched nose down and hit the pavement. On this contact, the nose gear broke off, and the (airplane) skidded on its nose for about 50 feet and came to rest. According to the student pilot, his approach speed was 65 knots, and about 20 feet above the runway, he reduced power to idle. The aircraft subsequently 'settled fast' and bounced. He unsuccessfully tried to recover, indicating that he 'got rigid on (the) control wheel position.' The pilot reported the accident could have been prevented by doing a go-around.
Probable cause
the pilot's improper flare and improper recovery from a bounced landing, which resulted in a hard landing and collapse of the nose gear. A factor relating to the accident was: the pilot's failure to perform a go-around.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC97LA042
- Event ID
- 20001208X07349
- Case number
- NYC97LA042
- 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: 028a1045d5a661c18825f78fb03e43d877d8f7b6eddc6f87cd79630f72bf4dc9; retrieved 2026-09-21T21:31:27.931Z.