LAX97LA258 · Centrair ASW20F
Centrair ASW20F · Accident: hard landing
From Minden-Tahoe Airport (MEV) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX97LA258
- 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
Centrair ASW20F
- Aircraft type
- Centrair ASW20
- 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
- N120MJ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Minden-Tahoe Airport (MEV)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 › Planning/decision, improper
- Weather condition › Downdraft
- Weather condition › Turbulence, terrain induced
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot of a glider said that as he was returning to the airport, he encountered strong turbulence and downdrafts, and concluded that he would not be able to safely reach the runway. He selected a field, and as he got closer, realized that he had too much energy for a straight-in approach and not enough for a pattern. The pilot said he then deployed some drag devices and began making S-turns. Reportedly, the glider encountered a downdraft and touched down hard with a very high sink rate. Ground witnesses reported that very gusty winds existed at the time of the landing. An FAA airworthiness inspector examined the glider and noted that no discrepancies were found.
Probable cause
the pilot's improper planning/decision and subsequent encounter with gusty winds and strong downdrafts, which precluded reaching the airport and induced an unrecoverable high sink rate during an off-airport landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX97LA258
- Event ID
- 20001208X08442
- Case number
- LAX97LA258
- 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 1997-07-25.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 2a7ec21ff70a346759955c1d77aa0865b26bb91937527af4691cfe7ec3067dd0; retrieved 2026-09-21T11:56:59.089Z.