ANC12IA085 · Bellanca 8KCAB
Bellanca 8KCAB · Incident: system/component malfunction/failure (non-power) during landing
From Anchorage, AK to Homer, AK
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC12IA085
- 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
- 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 8KCAB
- 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
- N5026B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Anchorage, AKTo Homer, AK
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- System/component malfunction/failure (non-power)
- 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
The pilot was landing the tailwheel-equipped airplane on a dry paved runway. He stated that just after touchdown, he heard a noise and felt the airplane pull to the left. He tried to abort the landing, but noted that the left main landing gear had separated from the fuselage, so he landed the airplane in the grassy area adjacent to the runway. During the landing the airplane sustained minor damage.
The spring steel left main landing gear assembly was fractured about 5 inches from the fuselage attach point. Postaccident metallurgical examination revealed that the landing gear leg fractured due to fatigue that initiated from pits on the lower surface of the leg. The pits were filled with brown paint that was covered with white paint. Therefore, it is likely that the pits were formed by corrosion that was not completely removed before the gear leg was repainted.
Probable cause
The failure of the left main landing gear leg due to fatigue. Contributing to the incident was maintenance personnel's failure to completely remove all corrosion before repainting the gear leg.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC12IA085
- Event ID
- 20120808X90723
- Case number
- ANC12IA085
- 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 local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 3bb5bcba8ee0fd2f474490eaa567e4c179aa31c57b11ce2aa3a0e4b6832b6b31; retrieved 2026-09-15T19:17:09.456Z.