NYC01FA102 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Bowman Field (LOU) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC01FA102
- 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
- 1 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
- N95655
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bowman Field (LOU), Louisville, KYTo 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Airspeed(vs), not maintained
- Pilot in command › Altitude, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot was maneuvering the airplane in the vicinity of family members, at altitudes ranging between 100 and 300 feet above the ground. After maneuvering for about 5 minutes, which included circling and wagging wings, the airplane headed southwest, then suddenly nose-dived into the ground. The student pilot had about 35 hours of flight time prior to the accident flight, including 1.1 hours during another solo flight earlier the same day. Weather at the time of the accident included clear skies and winds less than 10 knots. There was no evidence of mechanical malfunction.
Probable cause
The student pilot's failure to maintain adequate airspeed while maneuvering the airplane at low altitude. A factor was the pilot's overconfidence in his abilities.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC01FA102
- Event ID
- 20010426X00822
- Case number
- NYC01FA102
- 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, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2001-04-19.
- API snapshot SHA-256: aa2743b46d878d6a85d537bf58ebbf029c3a2e10f44de14bfb9090fdae9b2f18; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:35:18.691Z.