NYC97LA157 · Champion 7ECA
Fort Meade Flying Activity Champion 7ECA · Accident: main gear collapsed during landing
From Lee Airport (ANP) to Easton Airport / Newnam Field (ESN)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC97LA157
- 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
Champion 7ECA
- Aircraft type
- Champion 7
- 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
- N4178Y
- Operator
- Fort Meade Flying Activity
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lee Airport (ANP), ANAPOLIS, MDTo Easton Airport / Newnam Field (ESN)
- 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
- 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
- Landing gear, main gear › Fractured
- Maintenance, major repair › Inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that he made a 3-point landing with no bounce, and immediately thereafter, the airplane swerved left. He corrected, and the airplane started to swerve right, in a tightening circle. The left wing scrapped the runway, and the left main landing gear collapsed under the fuselage. An FAA inspector reported that the landing gear failed at a weld. Corrosion was visible on a portion of the face of the fracture surface. There was no record of the weld in the airplane logbooks.
Probable cause
an inadequate weld repair, which resulted in insufficient structural strength of the left main gear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC97LA157
- Event ID
- 20001208X08721
- Case number
- NYC97LA157
- 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: 1f75ee1e909bc2f39eb99dd81a1b933fc9e653b8f36f3c91e4e981a2a1caf841; retrieved 2026-09-22T18:54:11.069Z.