NYC98LA186 · Cessna 180
Cessna 180 · Accident: gear collapsed during landing
From College Park Airport (CGS) to Mountain Road Airport (MD43)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC98LA186
- 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 180
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 180
- 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
- N6503A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From College Park Airport (CGS), College Park, MDTo Mountain Road Airport (MD43)
- 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
- Landing gear › Fatigue
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane entered a left downwind for the west runway. On final, the pilot lowered the landing gear, selected full flaps, and touched-down smoothly approximately 300-400 feet down the 1,800 foot grass strip. While rolling out, and approximately 30 mph, the airplane yawed right about 170 degrees causing the left float to collapse and fold under the airplane. The right float's nose wheel was found in an area of loose dirt about 40 feet prior to the airplane's final resting. Examination of the right float's nose wheel revealed marks consistent with a preexisting fatigue crack.
Probable cause
Failures of the right float's nose wheel do to a preexisting fatigue crack.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC98LA186
- Event ID
- 20001211X11152
- Case number
- NYC98LA186
- 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: 6cb63e26e3b8c13e860200a90b43a9e27105ab2bba5cfadb1371303ad4e3201c; retrieved 2026-09-22T16:49:16.889Z.