What happened
The incident occurred during a training flight focused on touch-and-go landing procedures. The student pilot was conducting repeated practice maneuvers when the event took place on the third attempt. During this specific landing, the aircraft approached the runway with an excessive descent rate. The nose gear struck the pavement before the main landing gear made contact.
Following the initial impact, the aircraft began to porpoise, bouncing along the runway surface. The pilot was unable to arrest this oscillating motion before structural failure occurred in the nose gear assembly. Environmental conditions at the time included an eight-knot wind from ten degrees left of the runway heading, resulting in a tailwind component for the landing.
The investigation
Examination of the aircraft revealed that the nose gear had failed due to the excessive loads generated by the porpoising action. The sequence of events indicated that the initial contact was caused by an overly steep approach angle. The failure happened before the pilot could recover control or mitigate the bouncing motion.
Findings
The primary factors leading to the accident were the student pilot's decision to permit a too-steep approach and the subsequent inability to stop the porpoising action. Nose gear failure resulted directly from these operational errors during the touch-and-go maneuver.