Flight Express Flight 106
Cessna 210L · Accident: gear collapsed during landing
From Orlando Executive Airport (ORL) to Northeast Florida Regional Airport (SGJ)
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL98LA130
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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 210L
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- 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
- N300EW
- Operator
- Flight Express
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Orlando Executive Airport (ORL)To Northeast Florida Regional Airport (SGJ), Saint Augustine, FL
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- 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
- Landing gear › Malfunction
- Landing gear, normal retraction/extension assembly › Frozen
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, an unsafe landing gear indication occurred prior to landing at her destination. The pilot then stuck her head out of the airplanes window to visually inspect the landing gear, allowing her eye glasses to be blown off. After she talked with her company, it was decided that she return to Orlando, where there was better maintenance and other facilities to deal with the problem. Compounding the landing gear problem was the fact that the pilot had to make a night landing without her prescribed eyeglasses. Upon landing the main gear collapsed. The airplane skidded and did a 180-degree turn on the runway, coming to rest in a nose high attitude, with the weight of the airplane on the horizontal stabilizer. This resulted in substantial damage to the airplane. The pilot was not injured. A post crash inspection of the airplane, by company maintenance personnel, revealed a crack in the right main landing gear actuator and the power pack sequencing valve was operating incorrectly.
Probable cause
A 6-8 inch crack on the right main landing gear strut, which allowed the hydraulic fluid to escape from the system, along with a power pack sequencing valve failure which allowed the main landing gear to fold on landing. A factor in the accident was the pilots execution of a night landing without her prescribed eye glasses.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL98LA130
- Event ID
- 20001211X11007
- Case number
- ATL98LA130
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1998-09-26.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 73178817b5286c373eb597368c5caf201886973296e3a9102691bd3951cffca6; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:04:30.416Z.