CEN13CA400 · Cessna 120
Cessna 120 · Accident: nose over/nose down during landing
From Airlake Airport (KLVN) to Airlake Airport (KLVN)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN13CA400
- 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
- 0
- 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 120
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 120
- 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
- N2693N
- Operator
- Daniel B David · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Airlake Airport (KLVN), Lakeville, MNTo Airlake Airport (KLVN), Lakeville, MN
- 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 · landing roll
- 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
- Nose over/nose down
- 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor was conducting tailwheel training operations with the private pilot who did not have any tailwheel experience. During the second landing, the tailwheel touched down first, the airplane bounced slightly, and then landed on all three landing gear. According to the instructor, the airplane began to swerve left and right; the student did not make the proper corrections so he took over the flight controls. During the recovery the brakes were applied, the airplane nosed-over, and came to rest inverted on the runway. The flight instructor did not recall touching the brakes during the recovery, but thought the student might have inadvertently applied the brakes. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the fuselage and empennage. The flight instructor stated that prior to the accident there were no mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane. A postaccident examination of the airplane by a Federal Aviation Administration inspector revealed no evidence of preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The student pilot's excessive application of the brakes during the landing roll and the flight instructor's delayed remedial action, which resulted in a nose-over.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN13CA400
- Event ID
- 20130709X10954
- Case number
- CEN13CA400
- 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: cffc93099ea97f3cb89a2d58e3b282327b7fc1630748b917e67b88fae6f54881; retrieved 2026-09-15T22:09:47.000Z.