ERA13LA379 · Cessna 152
Patuxent River Navy Flying Club Cessna 152 · Accident: abnormal runway contact during landing
From Patuxent River Naval Air Station (Trapnell Field) (NHK) to Easton Airport / Newnam Field (ESN)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA13LA379
- 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
- N4922P
- Operator
- Patuxent River Navy Flying Club
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Patuxent River Naval Air Station (Trapnell Field) (NHK), Patuxent River, MDTo Easton Airport / Newnam Field (ESN), Easton, MD
- Aircraft age
- About 32 years (built 1981)
- 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
- Abnormal runway contact
- 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 systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot was landing at the first of two intended stops on the solo cross-country flight. She stated that she felt the main landing gear touch down on the runway first, followed by the nose landing gear. The airplane bounced, and the student pilot subsequently observed the airplane's nosewheel rolling down the runway in front of the airplane. The airplane settled back onto the runway and came to rest upright. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the engine firewall. An air traffic controller who observed the landing stated that the airplane touched down, porpoised, and bounced twice before impacting the runway at what appeared to be a steep angle.
Postaccident examination revealed that the nosewheel exhibited impact damage to the rim. Postaccident examination of the nose landing gear assembly revealed that the landing gear through bolt had fractured in shear overload. Further examination revealed that the bolt measured 5/16 inch in diameter. However, the bolt manufacturer specified that a 7/16-inch-diameter bolt should be used. Review of maintenance records could not determine when the 5/16-inch bolt was installed or how many hours of operation the airplane had accrued since the installation. Additionally, the bolt head was not recovered, and it could not be determined if the 5/16-inch bolt installed on the airplane met standard aircraft specifications. Generally, a 5/16-inch bolt would be expected to have half of the shear strength rating of a 7/16-inch bolt.
Probable cause
The use of an improper nose landing gear through bolt, which decreased the overall strength of the gear and resulted in overload failure during a hard landing. Contributing to the accident was the student pilot's inadequate landing flare, which resulted in the hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA13LA379
- Event ID
- 20130827X02938
- Case number
- ERA13LA379
- 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: d8b5322a988330b8261bb7001cd3efc5a1ce3083d64c2c41c4fb1edeffc5198d; retrieved 2026-09-15T22:37:51.723Z.