US Airways Flight 231
Boeing 737-300 · Accident: airframe, component or system failure during pushback
From Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) to PBI · West Palm Beach, FL
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC06FA184
- 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 737-300
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 737
- 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
- N529AU
- Operator
- US Airways
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT), Pittsburgh, PATo PBI · West Palm Beach, FL
- 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 121: Air Carrier
- 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
- Pushback/towing
- 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
- Driver of vehicle › Equipment, other, inadvertent
- Landing gear, main gear strut › Fractured
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During pushback, the airplane was seen to "bounce" up and down both at the nose and the tail, before the nose gear collapsed. Examination of the airplane revealed a broken lower drag brace that was buckled in compression, and fractured due to overstress. The tug was examined and the gear shift lever was found to be defective. It would not lock in the neutral gate, and could be moved easily through the gate between the forward and reverse gears. In addition, the tug experienced "hesitation and hard jerks" when shifting from forward to reverse. Skid marks at the scene were the same width as the tug's wheelbase, and were consistent with sudden engagement of the transmission.
Probable cause
The airplane tug driver's inadvertent movement of the tug gear shift lever from forward to reverse, which resulted in the nose landing gear collapse. Contributing to the accident was the defective gear shift lever.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC06FA184
- Event ID
- 20060803X01079
- Case number
- NYC06FA184
- 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: 1c87b73b56bda467f3ec7091913e78f5fa4b1aa3b060034535f36b1ad10d4596; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:51:27.072Z.