MIA00LA192 · Europa Aviation Inc EUROPA XS TRI-GEAR EUROPA XS
Europa Aviation Inc EUROPA XS TRI-GEAR EUROPA XS · Accident: hard landing
From Zephyrhills Municipal Airport (ZPH) to Lakeland Linder International Airport (LAL)
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA00LA192
- 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
Europa Aviation Inc EUROPA XS TRI-GEAR EUROPA XS
- Aircraft type
- Europa XS TRI-GEAR
- 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
- N912EA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Zephyrhills Municipal Airport (ZPH), Zephyrhills, FLTo Lakeland Linder International Airport (LAL)
- 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
- Dual student › Flare, improper
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Supervision, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor stated he and the student were performing touch-and-go landings, and the student was flying the airplane. The instructor further stated that during a touch-and-go landing, immediately on touchdown, a loud bang was heard and felt, and both he and the student observed a white object depart the right side of the aircraft. The instructor said he applied power, executing a go-around, and then verified that the nose gear was missing from the aircraft. The instructor said that they then proceeded to Lakeland airport to land, and while landing the nose strut appeared to give way, and the aircraft settled on its nose. A metallurgical examination of the damaged nose landing gear assembly by the National Transportation Safety Board's Materials Laboratory revealed that all fractures were typical of an overstress condition.
Probable cause
the flight instructor's inadequate supervision that resulted in the dual student performing an improper landing flare/touchdown which resulted in a hard landing and overload to the nose landing gear assembly.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA00LA192
- Event ID
- 20001212X21292
- Case number
- MIA00LA192
- 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: afef1b06eaba0a47e9597bd075dd426deef80120afd667c6949dab7aa1cca691; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:46:02.476Z.