CHI99LA092 · Cessna 172RG
Cessna 172RG · Accident: airframe, component or system failure during initial climb
From Lawrenceville Vincennes International Airport (LWV) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI99LA092
- 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
Cessna 172RG
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N9506D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lawrenceville Vincennes International Airport (LWV)To not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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
- Initial climb
- First occurrenceThe 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
- Airframe, component or system failure
- 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
- Landing gear, normal retraction/extension assembly › Failure, total
- Landing gear, normal retraction/extension assembly › Fatigue
- Manufacturer › Acft/equip, inadequate design
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During climb-out both pilots heard a pop from the right side of the aircraft under the right seat. The CFI performed a landing gear extension. The left landing gear would extend and lock, but the right main gear would extend partially and then retract simultaneously as the left main landing gear would lower and lock. The manual landing gear extension procedures were tried, but the right main landing gear failed to extend. An emergency landing was attempted. The airplane veered off the right side of the runway during the landing rollout. The right wing and right horizontal stabilizer were damaged when they impacted the ground. The examination of the right main landing gear actuator assembly revealed the actuator body was cracked in two locations near the cups for the bearings. One of the cracks had fatigue striations that originated at the corner formed by the intersection of the 2.25 inch inner-diameter surface of the gear housing and the 1.0 inch inner-diameter surface of the linear actuator portion of the actuator housing. The examination of the corner revealed the presence of circumferential scouring marks consistent with grinding or filing marks. The maintenance logbooks indicated that the landing gear actuator was originally equipped on the airplane and had a total of approximately 7,000 flight hours and 21,000 cycles. There is no life or component time limit listed for the component by the airplane manufacturer.
Probable cause
the fatigue fracture of the landing gear actuator.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI99LA092
- Event ID
- 20001205X00135
- Case number
- CHI99LA092
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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: d4dabadfe3a9b5106adfeba41de5f15b6cc9ae09922e3c895cb2e5b598090733; retrieved 2026-09-22T15:52:23.610Z.