LAX02LA081 · Conrad PULSAR 582
Conrad PULSAR 582 · Accident: hard landing
From Prescott Regional Airport - Ernest A. Love Field (PRC) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX02LA081
- 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
Conrad PULSAR 582
- Aircraft type
- Conrad PULSAR 582
- 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
- N3218N
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Prescott Regional Airport - Ernest A. Love Field (PRC), Prescott, AZTo 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 · 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
- Pilot in command › Aircraft control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Airspeed(vref), not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot landed the airplane hard on the nose landing gear, which collapsed; this was his first flight in this type of airplane. The pilot had recently purchased the airplane and this was his first flight in it. He had the previous owner sitting in the right seat for the familiarization flight. The airplane had a single control stick mounted between the two seats, and he was the sole manipulator of the controls. He took off and intended to stay in the traffic pattern to practice touch-and-go landings and reported that the winds were very gusty. On the first landing he made a short approach that was too fast. After the nose landing gear sheared off, the airplane slid across the runway before coming to rest. The pilot had about 100 hours total time in airplanes, primarily in the Cessna 182, and was flying on a student certificate without an endorsement for this airplane. The previous owner was a commercial pilot, but not a certified flight instructor.
Probable cause
The pilot failed to maintain landing reference speed and aircraft control. A factor was the gusty wind conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX02LA081
- Event ID
- 20020214X00220
- Case number
- LAX02LA081
- 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: 501c196138eaf663a3e537cb208fc2a6841efca4f4b4681a2fa7e05a2295f02b; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:08:04.277Z.