FTW99LA264 · Cessna 152
Harvey & Rihn Aviation Cessna 152 · Accident: hard landing
From Victoria Regional Airport (VCT) to T41
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW99LA264
- 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 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
- N5093Q
- Operator
- Harvey & Rihn Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Victoria Regional Airport (VCT), Victoria, TXTo T41
- 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, improper
- Pilot in command › Recovery from bounced landing, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The solo student pilot landed the airplane hard on the nose landing gear after touching down long on the 4,165 foot long runway. The airplane subsequently bounced and porpoised, resulting in the collapse of the nose landing gear. The student pilot was scheduled for a two-leg day VFR cross country flight. During the first leg of the flight, the student pilot was temporarily disoriented, and ended up flying 30 minutes beyond his intended destination. The pilot was able to land at an airport, where he topped off the airplane with fuel. The unscheduled landing delayed the pilot's scheduled itinerary by at least one hour. Dark night conditions prevailed by the time he entered the traffic pattern on the downwind leg for runway 30. The pilot reported that he was high on his first approach, and executed a go-around. The student pilot had 2.6 hours of night flight with his flight instructor, and he had not been cleared for night solo flights.
Probable cause
The pilot's hard landing as result of his improper landing flare and his improper recovery from a bounced landing. Factors were the prevailing dark night conditions and the student pilot's lack of total experience in night operations.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW99LA264
- Event ID
- 20001212X19771
- Case number
- FTW99LA264
- 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 1999-09-22.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 66d6f0ceccbd2749188d409dfead41e8f21a1ec35a2410913b8ec2bcc5752764; retrieved 2026-09-22T14:03:07.530Z.