WPR16LA139 · Cessna 140 G
Cessna 140 G · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport (STS) to Salinas Municipal Airport (SNS)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR16LA139
- 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 140 G
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 140
- 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
- N89965
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport (STS), Santa Rosa, CATo Salinas Municipal Airport (SNS), Salinas, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 70 years (built 1946)
- 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 structures
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot made a normal landing in his 1946 tailwheel-equipped airplane. During the landing roll, the left wing began to dip. The pilot applied opposite aileron, but the airplane continued to roll to the left, and the cabin floor deformed upward. The left wing and propeller struck the runway surface, and the airplane came to a stop on the runway shortly thereafter. Postaccident examination revealed that the left main landing gear leg had rotated aft and up, and that the landing gear leg support structure formed by two transverse bulkheads and portions of the lower fuselage skin had failed. Comparisons of fasteners, skin, and fairing panels revealed some discrepancies between the existing configuration and the original design, but the exact pre-accident configuration and condition could not be determined. Detailed laboratory examination revealed that the joint between the aft landing gear bulkhead and the lower fuselage skin had failed in fatigue. The fatigue failure sites were in a region of the airplane's structure that was not readily accessible for cleaning or inspection, and some sludge-like deposits of unidentified substance were observed in the location of the fatigue failure.
Probable cause
The fatigue failure of a bulkhead-skin joint that supported the main landing gear leg, which resulted in the collapse of the left main landing gear. Contributing to the failure were the non-original structural configuration of the 60-year-old airplane and the relative inaccessibility for inspection or cleaning of the structure in the region of the fatigue failure.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR16LA139
- Event ID
- 20160715X03849
- Case number
- WPR16LA139
- 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: 060580f46f508c190e829eba118d64646106c750c354c5379b0589b7ea4a6b10; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:39:35.969Z.