LAX05CA238 · Cessna 152
California In Nice Cessna 152 · Accident: hard landing
From Reid-Hillview Airport of Santa Clara County (RHV) to Rio Vista Municipal Airport (O88)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX05CA238
- 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
- N68475
- Operator
- California In Nice
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Reid-Hillview Airport of Santa Clara County (RHV), San Jose, CATo Rio Vista Municipal Airport (O88), Rio Vista, CA
- 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 › Directional control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Flare, misjudged
- 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 student pilot bounced the airplane during touchdown, lost direction control, veered off the runway, and nosed over. During the approach, the pilot realized that the crosswind was very strong, which made control difficult, and he decided to execute a go around. On the second approach attempt, he decreased the airplane's airspeed to approximately 60 knots, and still found the crosswind to be very strong, making the airplane difficult to control. Shortly thereafter, the airplane made contact with the runway and bounced four times. The student pilot lost directional control of the airplane and it veered off the side of the runway onto the grass median and nosed over. During the preflight briefing with his CFI, the instructor told the student pilot to divert to another airport if he could not make the landing into Rio Vista, California. The pilot stated that the airplane and engine had no mechanical failures or malfunctions during the flight.
Probable cause
the student pilot's inadequate recovery from a bounced landing and his failure to maintain directional control of the airplane during landing rollout. A contributing factor was the student's failure to divert to an airport with less severe crosswind conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX05CA238
- Event ID
- 20050907X01405
- Case number
- LAX05CA238
- 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: d94fbf0e5c993f47c55cd3ea09aae564cceefb7c17254deedde8662a686a4144; retrieved 2026-09-22T05:38:03.939Z.