WPR20CA302 · Cessna 152
Snohomish Flying Service Cessna 152 · Accident: hard landing
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR20CA302
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
- N946SF
- Operator
- Snohomish Flying Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 42 years (built 1978)
- 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 › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The solo student pilot reported that during landing, upon touchdown, the airplane bounced. The student’s flight instructor, who was at a radio, instructed him to go around so the student pilot increased the engine power, maintained the flaps at 30º, and the airplane drifted left of runway centerline. As the student pilot reached about 10 ft above the ground in a nose up attitude, the flight instructor radioed him again to “pitch down.” The student pilot then lowered the nose, but the airplane continued to drift left, impacted the adjacent grass field, and came to rest nose down. The engine truss sustained substantial damage. The student pilot reported that there were no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The solo student pilot's improper landing flare, which resulted in a bounced landing and his subsequent improper go-around, which resulted in an impact with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR20CA302
- Event ID
- 20200910X15331
- Case number
- WPR20CA302
- 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, coordinates, cause areas. 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: 71a2ab546a79937277cef78c5ce08af2e9e59f2bbb9e855a547a7b09d1a154f5; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:01:18.255Z.