CHI03LA294 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: hard landing
From Oakland County International Airport (PTK) to Oakland County International Airport (PTK)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI03LA294
- 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 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
- N757GL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Oakland County International Airport (PTK), Pontiac, MITo Oakland County International Airport (PTK), Pontiac, MI
- 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 › Recovery from bounced landing, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The nose landing gear collapsed during a recovery from a bounced landing. The student pilot reported that he was practicing landings on runway 9L, and upon touchdown during the second landing attempt, the airplane "bounced into the air". The pilot stated the airplane settled back to the runway and the nose landing gear touched down prior to the main landing gear. The pilot reported that the nose landing gear "folded and the aircraft veered to the left edge of the runway and then to the right[,] stopping in the middle of the runway." The student pilot reported his total flight time was 179 hours, of which 52 hours were as pilot-in-command. The pilot had flown 22 hours during the previous 90 days and 14 hours during the previous 30 days. Besides the accident flight, the pilot had not flown during the previous 24 hours. The local winds approximately 13 minutes prior to the accident were 060 degrees true at 10 knots gusting to 15 knots. The local winds approximately 26 minutes after the accident were 120 degrees true at 7 knots, winds direction variable between 100 and 160 degrees.
Probable cause
The student pilot's inadequate recovery from the bounced landing. Factors contributing to the accident were the variable crosswind, the misjudged flare that resulted in the bounced landing and the subsequent collapse of the nose landing gear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI03LA294
- Event ID
- 20030905X01468
- Case number
- CHI03LA294
- 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, coordinates. 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: 46d6ced01404bcfc6dcb43cc290238cfbad53d409a4e32666afac114f9649c98; retrieved 2026-09-22T08:36:48.967Z.