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LAX02LA021 · Cessna 182S

6 Nov 2001 · Palm Springs, CA, United States

Cessna 182S · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing

From Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport (TRM) to an unrecorded destination

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Event

NTSB case
LAX02LA021
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

Cessna 182S

Aircraft type
Cessna 182
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
N2453A
Operator
Unknown
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport (TRM), Palm Springs, CATo 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
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
Loss of control on ground/water
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 › Directional control, not maintained

Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

After landing on the 6,799-foot-long by 150-foot-wide runway, the aircraft veered to the right into soft sand and nosed over. The student pilot reported the landing was a good landing on the main landing gear. She lowered the nosewheel to the runway and was rolling smoothly when the aircraft suddenly veered to the right. She input left rudder but was unable to stop the aircraft from veering off the runway into soft sand where it rolled about 150 feet and nosed over. The pilot suspected an unseen dust devil may have been involved. An automated weather observation, 16 minutes before the accident, reported a left-rear, quartering surface wind at 4 knots. Forty-four minutes after the accident the surface wind was a left crosswind at 3 knots.

Probable cause

The failure of the pilot-in-command to maintain directional control of the airplane after encountering a dust devil during landing roll.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record LAX02LA021
Event ID
20011110X02223
Case number
LAX02LA021
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: e856845dbdc19e03ca5aa6970b3543fff06a9b3a6a68867c804ffae5c6c8c1de; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:26:02.600Z.