WPR16IA025 · Cirrus Design Corp SR22T
Cirrus Design Corp SR22T · Incident: landing gear collapse
From Santa Monica Municipal Airport (SMO) to Paso Robles Municipal Airport (PRB)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR16IA025
- 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
Cirrus Design Corp SR22T
- Aircraft type
- Cirrus SR22
- 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
- N999VX
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Santa Monica Municipal Airport (SMO), Santa Monica, CATo Paso Robles Municipal Airport (PRB), Paso Robles, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 1 year (built 2014)
- 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 · landing roll
- 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 systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot was landing the airplane when, during the landing roll, the nose landing gear collapsed. Examination revealed that the nose landing gear had separated, and metallurgical testing showed that the failure was the result of high stress fatigue cracking due to sideways bending from one side. The crack was through the strut tube located at the forward edges (toes) of the gusset tube where it welds to the main strut tube. No other anomalies were identified with the landing gear. Further testing revealed that shimmy events or nonstandard towing procedures could result in the cracks and eventual separation of the nose gear. Similar incidents have occurred involving the same nosewheel design. As a result, the airplane manufacturer released a service bulletin to inspect for cracking and a service advisory related to appropriate towing procedures. Additionally, the manufacturer updated the design of the nose landing gear to increase the strength of the strut tube.
Probable cause
The failure of the nose landing gear due to unanticipated fatigue loads.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR16IA025
- Event ID
- 20151109X01039
- Case number
- WPR16IA025
- 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: 83d678ddc56e72754e3d85567cf380fa5524faa1b2686aa48199751d5b2b6d52; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:57:35.413Z.