SEA01TA083 · de Havilland DHC-6-300
de Havilland DHC-6-300 · Accident: airframe, component or system failure during landing
From Boise Air Terminal/Gowen Field (BOI) to Star, ID
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA01TA083
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
- Government
- 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
de Havilland DHC-6-300
- Aircraft type
- de Havilland DHC-6
- 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
- N49SJ
- Operator
- Bureau of Land Management
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Boise Air Terminal/Gowen Field (BOI), Boise, IDTo Star, ID
- 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
- Public Aircraft
- 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, steering system › Fatigue
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that during the landing roll, the aircraft began to veer to the left. When aileron and rudder control were not effective to re-align the aircraft's direction of travel, the pilot transferred over to the nose wheel steering control. The pilot applied corrective input all the way to the right when he heard a "clink" sound. The aircraft exited the side of the runway and collided with the terrain. Post-accident inspection of the aircraft found that the nose wheel steering cable was broken. The cable was sent to the National Transportation Safety Board Materials Laboratory for examination. The specialist reported that the end of many wires exhibited fractures on a flat plane that was perpendicular to the longitudinal axis, typical of a fatigue crack. About 90 percent of the flat areas extended through the fracture face. The metallurgist reported that approximately 50 percent of the wires from the cable contained fatigue cracking.
Probable cause
Fatigue failure of the nose wheel steering cable during the landing roll. Rough/uneven terrain was a factor.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA01TA083
- Event ID
- 20010507X00900
- Case number
- SEA01TA083
- 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: 4272f5fbdfcad263e36f15c726dfab5aad567a2246cc8c376d3c9f81f4b0647d; retrieved 2026-09-18T21:20:35.751Z.