Ameriflight Cessna 402 B accident
Cessna 402 B · Accident: main gear collapsed while taxiing
From Lake County Airport (LKV) to Crater Lake-Klamath Regional Airport (LMT)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA03LA133
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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 402 B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 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
- N98635
- Operator
- Ameriflight
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake County Airport (LKV), Lakeview, ORTo Crater Lake-Klamath Regional Airport (LMT), Klamath Falls, OR
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Taxi · to runway
- 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
- Main 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, main gear › Collapsed
- Miscellaneous, dowel/pin › Failure
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot reported that the airplane's left main landing gear assembly collapsed while taxiing the airplane from the ramp to the active runway. Postaccident examination of the landing gear assembly revealed that the roll pin (part number NAS 561P4) that retains the attaching shaft (part number 0841011-1) to the trunnion assembly was fractured. This allowed the landing gear attaching shaft to shift from its installed position, resulting in the trunnion assembly separating from the landing gear support structure. Following the inspection of the failed landing gear, the operator inspected the landing gear of its remaining Cessna 402's, six in total. Subsequent to the inspections, the operator reported that they identified two aircraft with broken landing gear shaft roll pins. The roll pins were replaced, and the operator reported that the landing gear assemblies would be reexamined in six-month intervals.
Probable cause
Failure of the landing gear shaft roll pin resulting in a main gear collapse during the taxi phase of operation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA03LA133
- Event ID
- 20030717X01136
- Case number
- SEA03LA133
- 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 2003-07-08.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 29839329f67d061625934318d9767c64ba92e13258225a42416254d7139b5320; retrieved 2026-09-18T15:44:31.136Z.