ERA16LA073 · Cessna 310 Q
Cessna 310 Q · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Cobb County International Airport-McCollum Field (RYY) to Cobb County International Airport-McCollum Field (RYY)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA16LA073
- 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
- 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
Cessna 310 Q
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 310
- 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
- N7675Q
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cobb County International Airport-McCollum Field (RYY), Kennesaw, GATo Cobb County International Airport-McCollum Field (RYY), Kennesaw, GA
- Aircraft age
- About 43 years (built 1972)
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft handling/service
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot was landing the airplane after conducting a local flight. He reported that, during the landing roll, after a normal touchdown on the concrete runway, the left main landing gear (MLG) collapsed. The airplane then veered left off of the runway onto grass. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the left wing, left horizontal stabilizer, and the bottom fuselage near the tail section.
Examination of the airplane revealed that the left MLG down-lock bellcrank was fractured and had separated from its trunnion. The bellcrank bolt was sheared at the bolt head, consistent with overload. The upper end of the bellcrank remained attached to the outboard push-pull tube. The lower end of the bellcrank that attached to the rod end fitting at the lower side link was broken, consistent with a ductile tension failure. The fracture location was consistent with additional stress that would have been placed on the bellcrank if the landing gear had not been properly rigged. However, the damage to the landing gear precluded the ability to functionally check the gear or verify whether the landing gear system was properly rigged.
According to the airplane service manual, during each annual inspection, the landing gear's down-lock tension is to be checked. Review of the airplane's maintenance logbooks revealed that the last annual inspection was completed 1 year before the accident and that the airplane had been operated for 16 hours since that inspection. The maintenance logbook entries did not indicate that the landing gear system was checked during the inspection.
Probable cause
Inadequate inspection and rigging of the landing gear system, which resulted in the subsequent failure and collapse of the left main landing gear during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA16LA073
- Event ID
- 20151217X31910
- Case number
- ERA16LA073
- 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, 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: caa05c68f64b9f3ecb7aeea57bddd637d814653a0a353606b85a0b2462c9b00f; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:02:28.401Z.