LAX98LA299 · Cessna 185E
Cessna 185E · Accident: airframe, component or system failure during landing
From Southwest Wyoming Regional Airport (RKS) to FFZ
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX98LA299
- 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 185E
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 185
- 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
- N1613M
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Southwest Wyoming Regional Airport (RKS), Rock Springs, WYTo FFZ
- 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
- Airframe, component or system failure
- 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, wheel › Separation
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that when he applied the brakes during the landing rollout, the left wheel separated from the main landing gear. The aircraft then veered off to the left side of the runway. The aircraft was equipped with a snow-ski adapter kit, which had been installed on November 20, 1972. The four-wheel assembly retention bolts had sheared off upon the landing touch down, with the upper two bolts failing first. The nuts were then stripped off from the lower two bolts. The left landing gear wheel assembly separated from the landing gear strut. Research revealed that there is no inspection criteria to inspect the wheel assembly retention bolts.
Probable cause
The failure of the wheel assembly retention nuts and subsequent wheel separation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX98LA299
- Event ID
- 20001211X11107
- Case number
- LAX98LA299
- 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 1998-09-20.
- API snapshot SHA-256: f1688396449805e4d9f9711f61c5abc7d8479e62c254c93da4b79cc8f15b64ae; retrieved 2026-09-22T16:44:07.456Z.