ANC01LA136 · Cessna 185F
Cessna 185F · Accident: airframe, component or system failure while taxiing
From King Salmon Airport (PAKN) to YANTARNI, AK
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC01LA136
- 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
- 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 185F
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 185
- 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
- N177BM
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From King Salmon Airport (PAKN), KING SALMON, AKTo YANTARNI, AK
- 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
- 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, axle › Separation
- Miscellaneous, bolt/nut/fastener/clamp/spring › Overload
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial certificated pilot was back-taxiing on a runway in preparation for takeoff, and then began a 180 degree turn on the runway. During the turn, the pilot said he heard a scraping sound, the airplane wobbled and shimmied, and the right brake was not functioning. The right main landing gear strut collapsed near the axle attach point, and the right main wheel and tire rolled away from the airplane. The right wingtip and the propeller struck the ground, and the right gear strut was torn loose from its upper attach point. A postexamination of the right wheel and strut by the owner revealed the axle assembly separated from the lower end of the landing gear strut. There are four hex head bolts utilized to secure the axle to the landing gear strut. Each are inserted through the axle assembly and gear leg, and have a nut threaded and then torqued onto the bolt shaft. All four of the bolts were bent. Two of the nuts were stripped off their respective bolt shafts. The remaining two bolts were broken about mid-shaft. The owner of the airplane reported that about five days before the accident, new brake assemblies were installed on the airplane. The original bolts were re-used for the installation. One of the broken bolts was submitted to the National Transportations Safety Board's Materials Laboratory for examination. According to an NTSB materials engineer, the bolt was bent about 35 degrees, it had necking deformation adjacent to the fracture, and displayed features consistent with an overstress fracture in bending.
Probable cause
An overload failure of the main axle attaching bolts, and subsequent separation of the axle from the landing gear strut.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC01LA136
- Event ID
- 20010913X01936
- Case number
- ANC01LA136
- 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, coordinates. 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: 8acdba6c2864c05e170173fdcbb089c5784f059cdafb2cd3a1be23a1ef070661; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:35:57.438Z.