FTW98LA102 · Martin VARIEZE
Martin VARIEZE · Accident: hard landing
From Artesia Municipal Airport (ATS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW98LA102
- 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
Martin VARIEZE
- Aircraft type
- Martin VARIEZE
- 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
- N27CP
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Artesia Municipal Airport (ATS)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 › Compensation for wind conditions, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A flight instructor was to conduct airplane checkouts for the new owner and other club members that traveled from Spain. After some dual instruction, the pilot was endorsed by the flight instructor to solo the airplane. Witnesses at the airport observed the airplane executing 4 or 5 approaches to attempt to land on runway 12. On the fifth attempt to land, the airplane touched down hard and bounced back up in the air. The nose landing gear collapsed. The pilot added full power and the airplane slid for 1,125 feet down the active runway with the brakes locked. The airplane came to a stop after impacting a taxiway marker head-on. The pilot stated that either the wind was stronger than reported or the crosswind was closer to a 90-degree crosswind. The reported winds for the landings on runway 12 at the time of the accident were reported from 160 degrees at 14 knots. The 200-hour pilot had never flown a similar type of homebuilt airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate compensation for the crosswind. Factors were the prevailing crosswind and the pilot's lack of total experience in type of aircraft.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW98LA102
- Event ID
- 20001211X09432
- Case number
- FTW98LA102
- 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: fd9a561280cbfe2dd5bf70e2b377c753d2ebbd54f7d6c1fe4a9d080e9cd83a40; retrieved 2026-09-21T11:39:18.958Z.