Air India Boeing 747-400 accident
Boeing 747-400 · Accident: airframe, component or system failure during takeoff
From Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to Frankfurt Main Airport (FRA)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX06FA063
- 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
- Airline
- 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
Boeing 747-400
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 747
- 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
- VT-AIM
- Operator
- Air India
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Los Angeles, CATo Frankfurt Main Airport (FRA), Frankfurt
- 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 129: Foreign
- 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
- Takeoff · roll/run
- 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
- Airframe, component or system failure
- 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
- Company maintenance personnel › Maintenance, installation, inadequate
- Landing gear, tire valve stem › Undertorqued
- Landing gear, tire › Burst
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The four right main body landing gear tires burst during the takeoff ground roll, and the crew performed a precautionary landing. Pieces of the tires and wheel assemblies penetrated the fuselage structure and the airplane incurred substantial damage. Post accident examination revealed that the valve cores on three of the four inflation valves, including the two aft valves, were not torqued to the manufacturer's specifications and leaked steadily. Examination of the right aft main body landing gear tires (number 11 and 12) showed that they were operated in an over deflected condition at some point prior to the event, which resulted in internal damage to the tires. The aft tires failed first as a result of the internal damage and initiated the accident sequence. Damage to the forward tires was consistent with the tires bursting due to their impact by debris from the aft tires.
Probable cause
the incorrect installation of the inflation valve cores in the number 11 and number 12 wheel assemblies that allowed the tires to be operated in an over deflected condition that resulted in their failure.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX06FA063
- Event ID
- 20051227X02017
- Case number
- LAX06FA063
- 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 2005-12-20.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d6718c291e9cb10bf0563e39fa298d4cd1c99972fd1c3165fece86d8e8859ef0; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:56:36.627Z.