LAX98LA036 · Cessna 172RG
Cessna 172RG · Accident: gear collapsed during landing
From Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport (MYF) to Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport (MYF)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX98LA036
- 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
- N9451D
- Operator
- American Flyers
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport (MYF)To Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport (MYF)
- 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
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot and his instructor visually checked that the landing gear was down. On the landing roll the aircraft started to vibrate, and then rotated to the left. The instructor pilot shut down the engine and the right landing gear collapsed. The main gear actuator piston for the left main landing gear was found broken. A determination as to when the actuator piston was broken could not be made due to the extent of the damage. An examination of the aircraft logbook revealed that the main landing gear actuator piston had accumulated 1,530.2 hours since installation. The aircraft was examined on-scene with no further anomalies noted. An examination found beach marks on the fracture surface characteristic of a fatigue crack growth. The examination revealed that the fracture outside of the fatigue region was the result of a single event overload and not due to the fatigue crack.
Probable cause
Overload of the main gear actuator piston and the subsequent collapse of the landing gear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX98LA036
- Event ID
- 20001208X09203
- Case number
- LAX98LA036
- 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: 5df3fc36bc09165d611b07fc55073bdb6d35a72f4d1a6f809e503a106af23345; retrieved 2026-09-22T18:12:16.645Z.