FTW02LA158 · Air Tractor 402
Air Tractor 402 · Accident: hazardous materials leak/spill while maneuvering
From Hughes, AR (no airport) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW02LA158
- 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 402
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor 402
- 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
- N91660
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Hughes, AR (no airport)To not recorded
- 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- Maneuvering · aerial application
- 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
- Hazardous materials leak/spill
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While conducting an aerial application flight, the pilot noticed that three spray nozzles were leaking. Several crops in the area were susceptible to the chemical being dispensed, prompting the pilot to divert and execute a landing at an alternate airstrip to fix the nozzles. After touching down, the pilot stated the tail wheel did not lock properly, which resulted in the airplane kicking to the left and departing the airstrip. The airplane's left spray boom then became entangled in the adjoining wheat, and the airplane ground looped. The pilot reported having trouble with the tail wheel locking mechanism about a week before the accident.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to maintain directional control during the landing roll. Contributing factors were the malfunction of the tail wheel locking mechanism and the high vegetation along the sides of the airstrip.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW02LA158
- Event ID
- 20020524X00733
- Case number
- FTW02LA158
- 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: 78e233c0d3ce0c3b57de9f25c00fdf7b805657a964b79f3ecf4fc556488ef70b; retrieved 2026-09-22T10:55:33.195Z.