LAX98FA210 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: vortex turbulence encountered on approach
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX98FA210
- 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
- 1 · 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
- N67421
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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
- Vortex turbulence encountered
- 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 › Proper glidepath, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Proper touchdown point, not identified
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While the solo student pilot of the Cessna 152 was on downwind leg for landing, the air traffic controller directed the student's attention to a Boeing 757 aircraft that was preceding the student's aircraft for landing on the parallel runway. The threshold of the parallel runway is abeam and 500 feet to the right of the runway the student was to land on. The controller then advised of a 10-knot quartering headwind from the right, issued a wake turbulence precaution, and cleared the student pilot for the landing option. Witnesses reported that as the student pilot was on final approach, descending through approximately 100-foot altitude (agl), the aircraft abruptly rolled inverted and crashed short of the runway threshold. The Safety Board prepared a Study of Wake Turbulence Encounter using data from the Boeing 757's flight data recorder, tower communication tapes, and tower reported surface winds. The report concluded that the Cessna 152 descended into the Boeing 757's wake when the wake was 37 to 41 seconds old. The student's flight instructor told the Safety Board that the student, who had 136 hours of dual instruction and 20 hours of solo flight time, had received instruction in wake turbulence avoidance at three points in ground instruction. Furthermore, the instructor said that training as they had at the air carrier airport, most flights involved wake turbulence avoidance.
Probable cause
The failure of the pilot-in-command to identify a proper touchdown point on the runway and maintain an appropriate glidepath so as to remain clear of vortex turbulence from the preceding large aircraft. A factor in the accident was the pilot's failure to initiate a go-around in the known presence of vortex turbulence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX98FA210
- Event ID
- 20001211X10341
- Case number
- LAX98FA210
- 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 1998-06-24.
- API snapshot SHA-256: c2ed71b720ed047c69d4139297e87e59bd4c53b488a30f3d49ef8e71e0c1d0ee; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:31:47.863Z.