US Airways Boeing 727-200 incident
Boeing 727-200 · Incident: airframe, component or system failure while taxiing
From LaGuardia Airport (LGA) to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA)
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD99IA059
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- Airline
- 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
Boeing 727-200
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 727
- 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
- N926TS
- Operator
- US Airways
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From LaGuardia Airport (LGA), NEW YORK, NYTo Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA)
- 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 121: Air Carrier
- 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
- Taxi · from runway
- 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
- Minor
Cause areas
- Company maintenance personnel › Maintenance, lubrication, inadequate
- Landing gear, main gear strut › Separation
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A Boeing 727-200 received minor damage when the left main landing gear side strut separated during taxi. Examination of the right main landing gear revealed that the side strut assembly was separated from the main shock strut and that the gear door was open. The threaded portion of the main strut attachment clevis was separated from the side strut assembly. The clevis remained attached to the main shock strut. The clevis bolt was dry, corroded, and the threads were broken and stripped. There was no evidence of lubrication on the clevis bolt. The retaining nut and the lock nut inside the lower end of the side strut were also dry, corroded, and displayed corresponding damaged and stripped threads inside the lock nut. Metallurgical examination revealed the threads suffered severe corrosion damage prior to being stripped. The aircraft manufacturer stated that a re-design for the side strut assembly was in development to block moisture, prevent corrosion, and improve lubrication for the assembly.
Probable cause
The inadequate lubrication of the landing gear side strut assembly by company maintenance personnel. A factor in the accident was the inadequate design of the assembly that trapped water and prevented adequate lubrication.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD99IA059
- Event ID
- 20001212X19540
- Case number
- IAD99IA059
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- 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: b359878d354cfb238c70a26ba565fe4e06a5b3a60ca9e74055d98ad2e1a664e5; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:54:01.926Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N926TS; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.