CHI03LA177 · Waco ARE
Waco ARE · Accident: gear collapsed during landing
From Creve Coeur Airport (1H0) to Battle Creek Executive Airport at Kellogg Field (BTL)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI03LA177
- 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
Waco ARE
- Aircraft type
- Waco ARE
- 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
- N20953
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Creve Coeur Airport (1H0), ST LOUIS, MOTo Battle Creek Executive Airport at Kellogg Field (BTL), Battle Creek, MI
- 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
- 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
- Landing gear › Inadequate
- Landing gear, main gear strut › Collapsed
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 sustained substantial damage on impact with the runway during landing roll. The pilot reported that weather was clear with winds variable at 5 kts and was not a factor. The pilot stated, "Ground roll continued, aircraft came to the left a bit, inputted a little right rudder to correct. At this point, there was a sudden and strong learch forward. Aircraft quickly came to a stop on the runway, near centerline. Aircraft came to rest in pitched down, left wing low attitude with the left lower wingtip on the ground. ... Upon walking around the airplane, found the left main gear had collapsed and swung completely under the forward fuselage and rested against the right main gear." A post-accident inspection revealed that the left main gear cross-support had failed. An examination revealed that the landing gear cross supports did not show any apparent pre-existing conditions. The metal evident in the exposed crack areas did not have any signs of rust. Subsequent to the accident, the pilot determined that the cross support material used in the landing gear structure was not in accordance with the original design specifications. The original drawings on file at the Smithsonian Institute showed that the original wall thickness was greater than the failed material. The pilot stated that the airplane was repaired using the wall thickness specified in the original drawings.
Probable cause
The inadequate material used in the landing gear cross supports leading to its collapse during the landing roll.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI03LA177
- Event ID
- 20030624X00936
- Case number
- CHI03LA177
- 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: 9bf0f62b5dda90da574d24fb9389ad8a7545f44c8a903c45ece3e79db353b0d2; retrieved 2026-09-22T09:06:41.283Z.