ASTAR Air Cargo Douglas DC8 73F incident
Douglas DC8 73F · Incident: aircraft structural failure during pushback
From Miami International Airport (MIA) to CVG · Cincinnati, OH
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG10IA016
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- 0
- 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
- Not recorded
Douglas DC8 73F
- Aircraft type
- Douglas DC8
- 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
- N803DH
- Operator
- ASTAR Air Cargo
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Miami International Airport (MIA)To CVG · Cincinnati, OH
- 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 · engine not operating
- Defining eventThe 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
- Aircraft structural failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On January 7, 2010 Astar Air Cargo reported that during of a DC-8-73 hydraulic fluid leaking from a small crack at the upper end of the nose landing gear (NLG) cylinder. The following day, during taxi to the maintenance hangar, a loud bang was heard after a turn. Further inspection revealed that the NLG cylinder had fractured. The NLG was overhauled in April 2007 by AAR Landing Gear Services (LGS) in Miami Florida. The NLG was installed on the incident airplane on January 5, 2010 and had accumulated one ground air ground (GAG) cycle prior to the failure. The NLG assembly was removed and replaced and the failed cylinder was submitted to the Boeing Huntington Beach Failure Analysis Laboratory for failure analysis. At the time of the incident it was reported that the airplane had accumulated 86,911 flight hours and 32,212 cycles.
The NLG cylinder failed due to intergranular (IG) cracking at the inner surface of the cylinder coincidental to a chrome plating crack, then propagated by stress corrosion cracking. The plating crack was determined to be cleavage fracture and could have occurred during the grinding of the chrome plating to size. The fracture surfaces of the primary and secondary crack, each exhibited a combination of dark gray and orange-brown discoloration that extended to 0.95 and 0.85 inches, respectively, and towards the outer surface of the cylinder. A short distance from the outer surface of the cylinder, there was no observable discoloration on the fracture surface of the primary crack. The discoloration indicated that the fracture occurred over an unknown period of time. Etch inspection of the inner surface of the cylinder revealed evidence of circumferential grinding burns. Light circumferential scratches were also observed however their origin could not be determined.
Probable cause
Failure of the NLG cylinder occurred by intergranular rupture; coincidental to a chrome plating crack. The failure origin occurred along the inner surface of the cylinder and then propagated by stress corrosion cracking to the outer surface. A secondary crack with the same features as the primary crack was found diagonal to the primary crack. Both cracks initiated by intergranular cracking due to grinding burns caused by abusive grinding and propagated by stress corrosion cracking. Hydrogen embrittlement did not contribute to the intergranular cracking.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG10IA016
- Event ID
- 20100219X11249
- Case number
- ENG10IA016
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the UTC date the NTSB stores; the local time zone is not recorded, so the local date may differ by a day.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 26980240542264ab71a40f6aa8ff48ae07bb48ce320bab9a46c9baec1f6fc2a9; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:41:32.477Z.