SEA02FA064 · Cessna 182E
Cessna 182E · Accident: airframe, component or system failure during landing
From Friedman Memorial Airport (SUN) to Red Lodge Airport (RED)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA02FA064
- 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 182E
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N3184Y
- Operator
- Allen, Bruce L. · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Friedman Memorial Airport (SUN), Hailey, IDTo Red Lodge Airport (RED), Red Lodge, MT
- 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
- 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, nose gear strut › Fatigue
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot executed a normal 20-degree flap landing in calm wind conditions to the 4,000 foot long runway. During the rollout the nose wheel of the Cessna 182E separated and the aircraft veered left off the runway. Post-crash metallurgical examination of the nose gear fork fracture surface revealed thumbnail features typical of fatigue cracking that emanated from five different fracture planes. The fatigue regions were very smooth, contained crack arrest positions, and were darkly discolored. The exterior surface of the fork showed no evidence of corrosion pitting or mechanical damage adjacent to the fatigue regions.
Probable cause
Long term fatigue of the nose landing gear strut fork initiated by side loading which resulted in the separation of the fork from the strut and the consequent collapse of the nose gear. A contributing factor was the ditch the aircraft traversed during the ground roll.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA02FA064
- Event ID
- 20020412X00508
- Case number
- SEA02FA064
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2002-04-06.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 2caf199a0201aad4c9b46f8d27c49b64c4b5be894d43b2940963b2e04988f4c4; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:01:24.151Z.