LAX05LA130 · Cessna 421B
Cessna 421B · Accident: gear collapsed while taxiing
From Lake Havasu City Airport (HII) to Harry Reid International Airport (LAS)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX05LA130
- 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
Cessna 421B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 421
- 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
- N637SC
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Havasu City Airport (HII), Lake Havasu City, AZTo Harry Reid International Airport (LAS), Las Vegas, NV
- 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
- Taxi · from 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
- 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 › Fractured
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The left main landing gear collapsed during a precautionary landing. The pilot reported that after takeoff, he suspected a landing gear malfunction and returned to the airport. He made a gear up low approach to the airport. Maintenance personnel told him that the left gear was still extended. The pilot cycled the gear down and observed the landing gear lights were illuminated, indicating the gear was down and locked. The pilot made a soft field landing and let the airplane roll to the end of the runway. As he started to turn left, the left main gear collapsed. Post accident examination of the landing gear assembly revealed that the roll pin (part number NAS561P4-28) that retains the attaching shaft to the trunnion assembly had fractured and failed. 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.
Probable cause
the fracture of the landing gear shaft roll pin that resulted in a main gear collapse during the taxi.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX05LA130
- Event ID
- 20050406X00425
- Case number
- LAX05LA130
- 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: e81a9cc659653c922630d4bbf6b4b31424f304014be3d239f31e1c1583a2f717; retrieved 2026-09-22T06:07:00.981Z.