FTW99LA145 · Bellanca 8KCAB
Bellanca 8KCAB · Accident: airframe, component or system failure during landing
From A L Mangham Jr. Regional Airport (OCH) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW99LA145
- 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 8KCAB
- Aircraft type
- Bellanca 8
- 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
- N5500C
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From A L Mangham Jr. Regional Airport (OCH), Nacogdoches, TXTo not recorded
- 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, main gear attachment › Fatigue
- Landing gear, main gear › Separation
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Lufkin, TX, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The left main landing gear separated from the airframe following a normal wheel landing on runway 15. The separation resulted from failure of the 'U-bolt' attaching the left main landing gear to the fuselage. The left wing contacted the ground and the airplane came to rest on the west side of the 4,550 foot runway. A review of the maintenance history of the airplane revealed that the airframe had accumulated a total time of 708 hours. The failed landing gear U-bolt, part number 1-9805, was shipped to the NTSB Materials Laboratories in Washington, D.C., for metallurgical evaluation. The metallurgical evaluation revealed that the bolt failed as a result of fatigue.
Probable cause
The loss of control due to the separation of the left main landing gear as a result of the fatigue failure of the U-bolt which attaches the landing gear to the airframe.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW99LA145
- Event ID
- 20001212X18779
- Case number
- FTW99LA145
- 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: c262ece8f7c233e2fc3017ff754be4e04b18a6d3ec12e48c58ed1e3001b3ee3d; retrieved 2026-09-22T15:10:49.088Z.