Superior Air Charter Cessna 525B incident
Cessna 525B · Incident: landing gear collapse during pushback
From Teterboro Airport (TEB) to Teterboro Airport (TEB)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA15IA206
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
Cessna 525B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 525
- 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
- N784JS
- Operator
- Superior Air Charter
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Teterboro Airport (TEB), Teterboro, NJTo Teterboro Airport (TEB), Teterboro, NJ
- Aircraft age
- About 10 years (built 2005)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- 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
- Landing gear collapse
- 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 handling/service
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The unoccupied airplane was parked on the ramp with the parking brake off; ground personnel then attempted to tow the airplane. During the attempted towing, the nose landing gear (NLG) actuator attachment lug fractured, which resulted in the collapse of the NLG. Examination of the NLG actuator attachment lug revealed that the end of the attachment fitting was fractured on both sides of the bearing. The fractured surfaces exhibited features consistent with overstress separation. The reason for the overstress could not be determined.
Probable cause
The overstress fracture of the nose landing gear actuator (NLG) attachment lug during tow operations, which resulted in the collapse of the NLG.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA15IA206
- Event ID
- 20150507X20449
- Case number
- ERA15IA206
- 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: aeada953387413f88a3c2e71656dab94b2e10625ccc8f834e9a7e086f05e61d6; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:17:50.392Z.