FTW98LA418 · Bellanca 17-30A
Bellanca 17-30A · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Ozona Municipal Airport (OZA) to Terlingua Ranch Airport (1E2)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW98LA418
- 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
Bellanca 17-30A
- Aircraft type
- Bellanca 17
- 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
- N727DC
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ozona Municipal Airport (OZA), Ozona, TXTo Terlingua Ranch Airport (1E2)
- 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
- Loss of control on ground/water
- 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
- Pilot in command › Directional control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The 2,752 hour commercial pilot lost directional control of the single engine airplane after the nose landing gear tire made contact with the runway following a normal landing on the 80 foot wide gravel runway. The pilot reported that as soon as the nose wheel touched down, the airplane started to pull to the left and he was not able to control the airplane by applying opposite brake, rudder or nose wheel steering. Physical examination revealed that the airplane touched down left of centerline and the left wing collided with mesquite bushes alongside the left edge of the runway. The pilot stated that he suspected that the steering rod or the steering collar for the nose wheel steering had failed. The pilot stated that he was told by a person from the recovery crew that recovered the wreckage, that the steering collar rod was fractured. The nature of the fracture was not determined and the report from the recovery crew could not be confirmed due to the sale of the wreckage. The gravel on the runway was very loose and one of the pilots compared the feeling of operating the airplane in loose gravel as if the airplane was riding on ball bearings.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain directional control of the airplane for undetermined reasons. A factor was the loose gravel composition of the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW98LA418
- Event ID
- 20001211X11075
- Case number
- FTW98LA418
- 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: e11e148eb67b7acfecd6d5950d2a5ef183a57ce29120de2d7bb1918789593d62; retrieved 2026-09-22T16:40:41.010Z.