LAX01LA028 · Cessna 152
Pinnacle Aviation Academy Cessna 152 · Accident: hard landing
From McClellan-Palomar Airport (CRQ) to Qarn Alam Airport (RNM)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX01LA028
- 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
- N5447L
- Operator
- Pinnacle Aviation Academy
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From McClellan-Palomar Airport (CRQ), Carlsbad, CATo Qarn Alam Airport (RNM)
- 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 · aborted
- 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 › Elevator, improper use of
- Dual student › Habit interference
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The instructor ordered the student to go-around and the student pushed forward on the control wheel with his left hand and pulled back on the throttle with his right hand. The airplane struck the runway in a nose down attitude resulting in substantial damage. The student's approach had been "high and fast" and they were at 7 feet agl and 70 knots at midfield. The student pilot was a retired military pilot with about 4,000 hours of experience flying military fighter airplanes. The accident occurred on the student's third flight in an airplane with a control wheel. In the accident airplane, the left-seated pilot typically manipulates the control wheel with the left hand and the throttle with the right hand. In most military fighter airplanes, the throttle is manipulated with the left hand and the stick is manipulated with the right hand.
Probable cause
The dual student's habit interference, from his previous training in a different type of airplane, that precipitated his improper use of the elevator control during a go-around.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX01LA028
- Event ID
- 20001212X22201
- Case number
- LAX01LA028
- 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: 6961d1bea982a354f229e7a57f94e10a1e31db73e1f2f80c897336e88308edfd; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:21:41.787Z.