LAX02LA147 · Air Tractor AT-802A
Air Tractor AT-802A · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Eagle Airpark (A09) to Kingman Airport (IGM)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX02LA147
- 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
Air Tractor AT-802A
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor AT-802
- 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
- N90802
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Eagle Airpark (A09), Bullhead City, AZTo Kingman Airport (IGM), Kingman, AZ
- 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
- Loss of control on ground/water
- 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
- Pilot in command › Directional control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Ground loop/swerve, encountered
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane ground looped during landing and the left main landing gear strut fractured and separated. The pilot told a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspector that the landing gear strut collapsed unexpectedly, and without warning, during the landing roll, and the airplane ground looped to the right. It was not subjected to an abnormal load during landing and the airplane was relatively light with no chemical load aboard and about 1,300 pounds of fuel. The inspector examined the airplane and said the left landing gear leaf broke inside the saddle. There was rust and beach marks in the fracture face indicative of a pre-existing crack. The FAA inspector said the left landing gear strut, a single spring steel leaf, separated in the shoulder area where the strut enters the saddle at the fuselage skin line. The left landing gear wheel was broken in the outboard flange area and the tire was deflated. The tire exhibited deep radial scratch marks on the outboard side wall. The aileron hinge bracket at the left wing tip was bent inboard and striations on the left wing lower surface were oriented spanwise. The left wing outer half-span was bent upward accompanied by compression wrinkling of the upper wing skin. Examination of the fracture by a metallurgical laboratory revealed that the strut met the manufacturer's chemical, hardness, and materials specifications for the component. The fracture through the strut was characterized by two distinct modes. The first was 0.08 inches in depth and 0.37 inches in width and exhibited features consistent with fatigue. The fatigue crack had multiple initiation sites along the top surface in an area that had fretting damage. The remainder of the fracture face displayed gross overload features. According to the laboratory report, the transverse failure of the strut resulted from an overload condition, with high side and drag loads, well in excess of the design ultimate load for the component.
Probable cause
The failure of the pilot to maintain directional control during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX02LA147
- Event ID
- 20020506X00631
- Case number
- LAX02LA147
- 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 2002-05-02.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 5e2cb4f9dbdb8073ae38569f46488ca05112eb9b36c3605451069b2f20c14d21; retrieved 2026-09-22T10:57:57.535Z.