ERA25LA191 · Vans Aircraft Inc RV-12
Vans Aircraft Inc RV-12 · Accident: hard landing
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA25LA191
- 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
Vans Aircraft Inc RV-12
- Aircraft type
- Vans RV-12
- 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
- N4754
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 8 years (built 2017)
- 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 pilot was practicing takeoffs and landings in the airport traffic pattern and reported that he was slightly high on final approach and added power to reach the runway threshold. As he began the flare, a gust of wind struck the airplane and it yawed to the right. He applied left rudder to correct, but the descent rate remained high, and the airplane touched down hard on the right main landing gear and bounced. After regaining control, he completed the landing. During the landing rollout, he described feeling a vibration and hearing a scraping noise, which led him to believe the nose landing gear had collapsed. The airplane subsequently came to reset and a postimpact fire ignited inside the engine cowling. Airport personnel extinguished the fire shortly thereafter. The airplane’s fuselage was substantially damaged during the accident sequence. The pilot reported that there were no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures of the airplane’s flight controls that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper landing flare, which resulted in a hard landing and the collapse of the nose landing gear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA25LA191
- Event ID
- 20250430200085
- Case number
- ERA25LA191
- 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, 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: de0e1100329189997693b4e711406cf2c53a3c0c9f3277c0a1e70a4a24ed839b; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:51:29.145Z.