NTSB Factual Report

On August 30, 2001, at 1130 cdt, a Cessna 182-RG, N9984C, was substantially damaged when the aircraft landed hard at Manhattan Municipal Airport, Manhattan, Kansas while on an instructional flight. The instructor pilot and the student were not injured. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed and the flight was not on a flight plan. The nose gear broke on the second landing after a bounced landing.

The Instructor Pilot stated "Flight departed on local IFR instructional flight in VMC - review for checkride. We did several approaches and were completing a practice ILS cleared for circle to land 21. ..... (student) was flying and arrived on short final @ 700' AGL, too high for normal approach. I took the yoke to demonstrate minimum safe approach speed as a way to loose (sp) altitude with minimum forward speed. As I discuss and demonstrated the procedure, we descended to land and being able to land w/out a go-around, I did, since there wasn't time to transfer controls back to .... (student) we landed normally, bounced a little and touched down again in a normal attitude. However a bracket had failed allowing the nose gear to retract forward in the normally retracted position. The student had his hand on the throttle at all times and it remained @ idle. Attachments provide additional evidence that this was not an unnecessarily hard landing. CONSIDERATIONS: This incident could have been prevented had I focused more on flying than instructing. This was perhaps not the ideal time to introduce this concept."

The Student Pilot stated: "I let him have the controls and he put the airplane into a nose high attitude with no power. Mr. ....... had a very high angle of attach (sp) and was pulling the control wheel all of the way to his chest. He looked at me and said something about this is what you would do if you lost an engine and are committed to landing in a tight spot. His exact words were 'you have to put it in your gut and work the rudders to keep it from stalling'. He also told me that you can land in an emergency without much forward airspeed. Mr. ....

continued the stall and the stall warning was on full audible tone. It was not intermittent, but a full stall warning bell. I don't know exactly how much time elapsed, but I know that we were in slow flight for a while. We went right past the fixed distance markers (1000 foot) and were over the runway. I honestly thought that Mr. ..... intended on applying full power and was going to put the nose down at some point soon. All of the sudden, Mr. .... began screaming 'power' 'power' 'power'. I reached up with my right hand and pushed the throttle to the firewall. It was too late. We hit extremely hard on the main landing gear with the right main gear touching first. The airplane then bounced up in the air approximately 15-20 feet and nosed over. We were in the air for some time between the landings......The airplane then went into a nose low attitude on the way back to the ground. Mr. .... was still on the control yoke with both hands. The airplane hit hard on the main gear and the next thing I heard was the prop striking the ground. The plane came to final rest on the nose with the tail standing high in the air."

Inspection of the nose gear assembly disclosed breaks consistent with overload fractures.

NTSB Probable Cause

the instructor pilot allowing an excessive descent rate to develop and not correcting the excessive descent rate.