GAA16CA286 · Cessna 172 D
Mission Aviation Training Academy Cessna 172 D · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Friday Harbor Seaplane Base (W33) to Arlington Municipal Airport (AWO)
Event
- NTSB case
- GAA16CA286
- 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 172 D
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N539MT
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Friday Harbor Seaplane Base (W33), Friday Harbor, WATo Arlington Municipal Airport (AWO), Arlington, WA
- Aircraft age
- About 54 years (built 1962)
- 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 oper/perf/capability
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot of the tricycle landing gear-equipped airplane, he made a normal landing, but the airplane began to veer left of the centerline during the landing roll. He corrected with right rudder and heard a "thump" as if something affixed to the airplane was being dragged, and the rudder steering became ineffective. He recalled that, with constant hard right rudder input, coupled with dynamic braking, he turned the airplane to the right, the nose landing gear collapsed, and the airplane skidded to a stop. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the firewall.
Photographs provided by the Federal Aviation Administration inspector revealed that the right steering rod end had failed and that the bolts of the nose gear firewall mount were pulled from the firewall. The nose gear assembly had rotated more than 90° to the left and was found underneath the fuselage.
The NTSB investigator-in-charge asked that the two additional airplanes in the operator's inventory be inspected. The operator found that the steering rod ends of the inspected airplanes were bent and showed signs of cracking between the threads. The steering bungees were visually inspected; however, they could not be thoroughly inspected without damaging the component.
Probable cause
The failure of the airplane’s right steering rod end, which resulted in the pilot’s inability to maintain directional control.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record GAA16CA286
- Event ID
- 20160607X81747
- Case number
- GAA16CA286
- 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: 624f773ccabfe4f67fb2fdd37e1b98c81f8407e650548db2da14bf4bcfe2a351; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:28:42.314Z.