NYC02LA093 · D'Apuzzo D-260
D'Apuzzo D-260 · Accident: gear collapsed during landing
From Nazareth, PA (no airport) to Aeroflex-Andover Airport (12N)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC02LA093
- 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
D'Apuzzo D-260
- Aircraft type
- D'apuzzo D-260
- 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
- N112JF
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Nazareth, PA (no airport)To Aeroflex-Andover Airport (12N), Andover, NJ
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Proper alignment, not obtained
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 stated that as the airplane touched down on the runway, he heard a "pop," and the left main gear collapsed. Two witnesses reported that the airplane touched down hard, and with a side load on the landing gear. Examination of the left main landing gear revealed that two 5/16-inch bolts secured the spring gear to the airframe. One of the two bolts had sheared, and the other was bent. According to a Safety Board Metallurgist, the bolt failure was consistent with a direct shear ductile overstress separation.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to obtain proper runway alignment while landing, which resulted in a gear collapse.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC02LA093
- Event ID
- 20020509X00651
- Case number
- NYC02LA093
- 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: b06d23b88f80437f3882cc569017266cdfc23e00d3777d70be0692a3912778d9; retrieved 2026-09-22T10:57:25.920Z.