CEN12CA277 · Cessna 152
Alpha Tango Flying Services Cessna 152 · Accident: hard landing
From San Antonio International Airport (SAT) to Stinson Municipal Airport (SSF)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN12CA277
- 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
- N94500
- Operator
- Alpha Tango Flying Services
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From San Antonio International Airport (SAT), San Antonio, TXTo Stinson Municipal Airport (SSF), San Antonio, 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
- Defining eventThe 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The solo student pilot intended to practice takeoffs and landings at a nearby airport. On the first landing, the airplane touched down on the main wheels and bounced. The nose landing gear subsequently impacted the runway, separating the nosewheel and landing gear strut. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the firewall and wing struts. The pilot noted that she had very little practice with straight-in approaches. In addition, she thought that using the traffic pattern to set up for the landing might have prevented the accident. The student pilot's logbook revealed that this was her second solo flight and the first time she traveled to the nearby airport without a flight instructor on board. She had logged a total of 1/2 hour of solo flight time prior to the accident flight. Several flights had been logged between the student pilot's home airport and the nearby airport with a flight instructor on board. The logbook contained a current solo endorsement and an endorsement for repeated solo flights between the airports involved.
Probable cause
The student pilot's misjudgment of the landing flare, which resulted in a hard/bounced landing and subsequent impact with the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN12CA277
- Event ID
- 20120507X11122
- Case number
- CEN12CA277
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: 081a905d7a7af39799da715c58260b0a23fc804632f93ecfcd83288dc6e7ea58; retrieved 2026-09-15T18:01:00.483Z.