LAX05LA245 · Bellanca 8GCBC
Bellanca 8GCBC · Accident: nose over during landing
From Oroville, CA to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX05LA245
- 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
Bellanca 8GCBC
- Aircraft type
- Bellanca 8
- 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
- N87008
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Oroville, CATo 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 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
- Nose over
- 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, normal brake system › Binding(mechanical)
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 nosed over during landing. The pilot said he had been out practicing landings, and the accident landing was to be his last of the day. The first three landings were completed with no discrepancies. On the fourth landing, the airplane touched down on the main landing gear in a tail low attitude; the tail started to rise, and the pilot thought that the main landing gear "appeared to make a slight 'bounce.'" He did a go-around and came back to land for the last time. On the accident landing, he did a 3-point landing. The landing was normal, power was at idle, and he noted his airspeed at 65 miles per hour; however, it felt as if the brakes were being "strongly applied." The tail started to rise, and he immediately pulled back on the stick to its full rearward position. He checked his foot position on the rudder pedals, and removed them temporarily to see if that would help; however, the braking action continued with no airplane response to the full aft stick. The airplane rotated forward, and nosed over. The pilot stated that after the accident he walked the runway and saw that the main landing gear left straight skid marks for about 150 feet from the touchdown point, until the airplane nosed over. A witness observed black smoke coming from the wheels just after the airplane came to rest inverted. Another witness was at the airplane about 25 minutes after the accident and attempted to rotate the main wheels. The witness said that they would rotate, but that there was "quite a bit of drag on them." Two airframe and power plant mechanics examined the airplane the day after the accident and found no identifiable brake system anomalies. They noted that the parking brake was in the OFF position, and indicated that the skid marks on the runway were indicative of the brakes either partially or fully activated on touchdown until the airplane turned over. They theorized that the brake anomaly might have been due to the brake piston being stuck, possible foreign debris in the brake lines or brakes themselves, or a high ambient temperature causing internal hydraulic pressure buildup in the cylinder and lines, thus activating the brakes.
Probable cause
a binding and/or activation of the brakes that lead to an inadvertent nose over. The underlying root cause of the brake binding/activation could not be determined.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX05LA245
- Event ID
- 20050817X01266
- Case number
- LAX05LA245
- 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 2005-07-26.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 800e74fc31d7127a86648ea0ba3f4d6bd53edb5c999c8eeb9dcb3c5814329785; retrieved 2026-09-21T18:56:53.188Z.