NYC99LA017 · Burkhart Grob G103-TWINA
Burkhart Grob G103-TWINA · Accident: hard landing
From 5B2 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC99LA017
- 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
Burkhart Grob G103-TWINA
- Aircraft type
- Grob G103
- 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
- N4446T
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 5B2To 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The purpose of the flight was to conduct a local area glider flight. The glider departed the airport, and released from the tow-plane at 3,000 feet MSL. The pilot looked for thermals, but found none. He remained within 2 miles of the airport then decided to abort the flight due to insufficient lift. The pilot made a left downwind entry at 800 feet above the ground, turned base, then final. While on final, the pilot had his hands full just to keep the glider lined-up with the runway because of turbulence. The glider touched down at the intended touchdown point, but bounced back into the air. After the first bounce, the pilot was focusing on maintaining runway alignment that the glider began to oscillate. After contacting the runway a total of four times, the pilot was able to regain control of the glider and complete the landing. An after landing inspection revealed substantial damage to the tail wheel, and tail section of the glider.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain control of the glider while landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC99LA017
- Event ID
- 20001211X11336
- Case number
- NYC99LA017
- 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: c886cae58dcd32438a6236cea7a149214ce035ad329f40a374eba36c7a8748b8; retrieved 2026-09-22T16:27:05.398Z.