DFW07CA030 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: hard landing
From Arcola, TX to Arcola, TX
Event
- NTSB case
- DFW07CA030
- 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
- N67503
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Arcola, TXTo Arcola, TX
- 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 › Flare, improper
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The 2,480-hour commercial pilot, who reported having accumulated a total of 380 hours in the make and model airplane involved in the accident, reported that on the third touch and go landing, while practicing a short field approach and landing to a 5,000-foot-long by 100-foot-wide paved runway, he failed to maintain control of the single-engine airplane and landed hard and short of the landing threshold for Runway 09. According to the FAA inspector, who responded to the accident, the airplane's nose gear collapsed and the engine firewall sustained structural damage. When asked how this accident could have been prevented, the pilot reported that "short field landings should always be practiced using a simulated beginning point of the runway. It is not necessary to use the actual landing threshold." The pilot also reported that there were no mechanical deficiencies with the airplane or engine prior to the accident. Weather was reported as calm winds, unlimited visibility, clear skies, temperature 68 degrees Fahrenheit, dew point 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and a barometric pressure setting of 30.22 inches of mercury.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper flare, which resulted in a hard landing. A factor was the misjudged touchdown point.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DFW07CA030
- Event ID
- 20070117X00060
- Case number
- DFW07CA030
- 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: 2cf1fe951a5ec02f1e2bee9e17d6b3f525c8dbd6319afcd4620d1b5295a7c046; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:12:39.806Z.