Sun Country Airlines Flight 791
Boeing 727-224 · Accident: airframe, component or system failure while taxiing
From Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport / Wold–Chamberlain Field (MSP) to San Francisco International Airport (SFO)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI00LA296
- 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
- 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 727-224
- 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
- N296SC
- Operator
- Sun Country Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport / Wold–Chamberlain Field (MSP)To San Francisco International Airport (SFO), San Francisco, CA
- 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 · to 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Landing gear, wheel › Failure, total
- Landing gear, wheel › Fatigue
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The Boeing 727-224 number 3 wheel assembly failed during taxi for takeoff and pieces of the wheel assembly impacted the airframe causing damage. Examination of the wheel assembly revealed a fatigue failure that emanated from a point at the inside diameter of one of the brake lugs. A circumferential scratch was found adjacent to the fatigue origin. The wheel half had been inspected by an approved repair station and shipped to the airline on July 21, 2000. The wheel was installed on the accident aircraft and had accumulated 356.2 hours time in service at the time of the accident. A review of repair station records revealed that the repair station had been rejecting about 4 wheel halves per month. Prior to the accident, the repair station was finding cracks on other wheel halves in the area where the wheel failure occurred. The repair station had been in contact with the wheel manufacturer concerning this matter and had sent representative wheel halves to the manufacturer for evaluation. In a conversation with a representative of the Federal Aviation Administration, the wheel manufacturer stated that one of the returned wheel halves had been examined and that a manufacturing defect had created a stress concentrator, which resulted in a fatigue failure of the wheel half. The wheel manufacturer issued a Service Bulletin to rework the lugs and to provide guidance in inspecting the affected areas of the wheel assembly.
Probable cause
The fatigue failure of the wheel assembly. A factor was the inadequate inspection procedures prior to the issuance of a service bulletin.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI00LA296
- Event ID
- 20001212X21929
- Case number
- CHI00LA296
- 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: 70378a2c0bc7977f375bb0747d5d5e91532ed0e2a5fca26bd2bd167e88d51ba1; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:26:14.743Z.