LAX01LA230 · Bellanca 8GCBC
Bellanca 8GCBC · Accident: nose over during landing
From Air Sailing Gliderport (NV23) to Nixon, NV
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX01LA230
- 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
- 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
Bellanca 8GCBC
- Aircraft type
- Bellanca 8
- 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
- N8638V
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Air Sailing Gliderport (NV23), Sparks, NVTo Nixon, NV
- 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 · landing roll
- 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
- Nose over
- 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 › Distance/speed, misjudged
- Pilot in command › Proper touchdown point, not attained
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The accident tow plane pilot intended to recover a glider that had made an off site landing on a hard gravel road. The glider's ground crew had positioned the glider about midway on the road, which was 4,000 feet long. The tow plane pilot's approach was slightly faster than intended, and the airplane landed long on the downhill road, with a slight tailwind. Also, the pilot misjudged the available stopping distance. As the tow plane approached the stationary glider, the pilot applied heavy breaks to decelerate, and the tow plane nosed over.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to attain the proper touchdown point and his misjudged distance/speed during landing rollout. Factors were the tailwind condition and the downhill landing area.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX01LA230
- Event ID
- 20010706X01323
- Case number
- LAX01LA230
- 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 2001-07-01.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 0f42595735612b14ca8cfb1ae712e846d3a1a75751aa4de42055edd3b325e9f3; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:49:03.802Z.