Air France Boeing 747-228F incident
Boeing 747-228F · Incident: gear collapsed while taxiing
From MMEX · Mexico City to George Bush Intercontinental Airport (KIAH)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW02IA061
- 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
- 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
- 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 747-228F
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 747
- 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
- F-GCBG
- Operator
- Air France
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From MMEX · Mexico CityTo George Bush Intercontinental Airport (KIAH), Houston, TX
- 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 129: Foreign
- 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
- Gear collapsed
- 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
- Landing gear, main gear strut › Corroded
- Landing gear, main gear strut › Cracked
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After a normal touchdown and rollout, the 747 cargo airplane exited the runway onto a high-speed taxiway. The captain, noticed that the airplane was "dragging," to the right. The need for additional power for taxi seemed too great, so the crew stopped taxi and applied the parking brake. On-site examination revealed the right outboard main landing gear trunnion was completely fractured and separated several inches inboard of the aft trunnion bearing. Further visual inspection of the fractured area showed evidence of corrosion and what appeared to be a pre-existing crack on the upper portion of the outer cylinder of the trunnion and a metallurgical examination showed evidence of stress corrosion cracking (SCC). The inspection criteria outlined in Airworthiness Directive (AD) repalc90-06-18 R1 required the operator to perform a visual inspection, or a visual plus eddy current inspection of the wing landing gear at the trunnion, for cracks and corrosion. The inspection criteria outlined in AD 2001-17-25 required the operator to perform a detailed visual inspection using a bore scope to find cracking and corrosion of the aft trunnion outer cylinders of the wing landing gear, within 180 days from October 3, 2001. According to the operator's records, the bore scope inspection had not been performed, as per the AD, it was not due until April 3, 2002. Historical review of Service Difficulty Reports (SDR's) revealed 19 occurrences of SCC associated with corrosion of the aft trunnion outer cylinder stressed areas. Due to these SDR data, the manufacturer issued ASB 747-32A2465 revision 1, which was mandated by a new FAA AD 2001-17-25. AD 2001-17-25 included a bore scope inspection of the affected area of the trunnion due to the fact that the propagation of SCC cracking was internal on the cylinder and not readily detected by visual or eddy current methods as per the original AD 90-06-18 R1.
Probable cause
Stress corrosion cracking (SCC) of the aft trunnion outer cylinder. A factor was the inadequate inspection criteria of the Airworthiness Directive to detect pre-existing SCC.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW02IA061
- Event ID
- 20020110X00056
- Case number
- FTW02IA061
- 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, 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: 797a8bc051190479208be5f119f11b7f0cec1686c8d2cf70f845fb77b9ac398c; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:06:58.869Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for F-GCBG; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.