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MIA99LA035 · Cessna 182C

20 Nov 1998 · St. Petersburg, FL, United States

Cessna 182C · Accident: hard landing

From Airport Manatee Airport (48X) to an unrecorded destination

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Event

NTSB case
MIA99LA035
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 182C

Aircraft type
Cessna 182
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
N8620T
Operator
Unknown
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Airport Manatee Airport (48X), Palmetto, FLTo 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, misjudged

Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

The flight was under a special VFR request en route to St. Petersburg. According to the pilot, as he began to flare the airplane the plane dropped as if a strong downdraft hit. The reported winds and visibility at the airport about the time of the accident was reported as: winds from 140 degrees at 5 knots, and the visibility was 1 3/4 sm, with haze. The accident was not reported immediately after it had occurred, about 1 week later an FAA inspector was doing a surveillance at an FBO (fixed base operator) and noticed N8620T with it's nose gear 'severely bent aft.' When the inspector examined the wreckage it was determined that the airplane had sustained substantial damage. According to the FAA's report, '[the] pilot had a hard landing causing substantial damage to the aircraft structure.'

Probable cause

the pilot misjudged the flare, resulting in a hard land and subsequent damage to the airplane.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record MIA99LA035
Event ID
20001211X11479
Case number
MIA99LA035
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: e3f4b69bc3777d72094d957b1e3bc4939e8599b12ff410b865d2454d688cd193; retrieved 2026-09-22T16:19:13.782Z.