Delta Air Lines Flight 1470
Boeing 727-247 · Accident: main gear collapsed during landing
From Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) to Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW97FA255
- 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
- Airline
- 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
Boeing 727-247
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 727
- 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
- N2809W
- Operator
- Delta Air Lines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), DFW AIRPORT, TXTo Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ)
- 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 121: Air Carrier
- 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 · landing roll
- 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
- Main gear collapsed
- 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
- Company maintenance personnel › Maintenance, inspection, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The Captain reported a normal flight and that the landing approach was stabilized. He stated that the wind was 'right down the runway for the landing.' As the airplane decelerated through 70 KIAS, the first officer reported hearing a 'loud bang,' and the airplane began 'listing heavily to the right and drifting to the right.' The pilots determined that the right main landing gear (MLG) had collapsed and an evacuation was ordered. The right MLG was last removed (18,188 cycles before the accident) for overhaul on April 8, 1988, and the right MLG forward trunnion bearing support fitting (FTBSF) was last ultrasonically inspected in May 1993 (7,634 cycles before the accident). A Service Bulletin, dated March 8, 1990, recommended that the MLG FTBSFs be ultrasonically inspected after 12,000 flight cycles every 6 months or 1,500 flight cycles, whichever occurred first. Operators were to continue this inspection cycle until the part was replaced or the preventative modification was done. The NTSB Materials Laboratory examined the broken right MLG FTBSF and determined that the failure was the result of stress corrosion cracking.
Probable cause
The inadequate inspection of the right main landing gear forward trunnion bearing support fitting. Factors were the failure of the right main landing gear forward trunnion bearing support fitting and the subsequent right main landing gear failure.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW97FA255
- Event ID
- 20001208X08354
- Case number
- FTW97FA255
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- 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: 579e8b881f930b15747e842b284b01f2f35a69428b5742089b46e607d76bcb0c; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:29:34.873Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N2809W; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.