WPR19LA114 · Great Lakes 2T-1A-2
Great Lakes 2T-1A-2 · Accident: flight control system malfunction/failure en route
From Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport (MYF) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR19LA114
- 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
Great Lakes 2T-1A-2
- Aircraft type
- Great Lakes 2
- 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
- N101GL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport (MYF), San Diego, CATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 44 years (built 1975)
- 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
- En route · climb to cruise
- 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
- Flight control system malfunction/failure
- 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 systems
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
About 5 minutes after taking off, the pilot observed that the left upper aileron had come loose from the inboard hinge. The pilot returned to the departure airport and landed uneventfully. A postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that a wing rib aft of the spar at the outboard aileron cutout was substantially damaged.
Examination of the aileron hinge strap fracture surfaces revealed crack arrest marks and thumbnail-shaped patterns on the fracture surfaces, which emanated from both the top and bottom surfaces of the hinge strap. The fracture surfaces were consistent with asymmetric reverse-bending fatigue crack propagation.
The fatigue cracking propagated from the top and bottom surfaces through almost the entire cross-section of the hinge strap.
The pilot reported that while there were no inspection criteria from the manufacturer relative to the hinge straps, all hinge straps were inspected as part of each annual inspection.
Probable cause
The fracture of the aileron hinge strap due to fatigue crack propagation, which resulted in substantial damage to a wing rib aft of the spar at the outboard aileron cutout. Contributing to the accident was inadequate maintenance inspection.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR19LA114
- Event ID
- 20190316X10529
- Case number
- WPR19LA114
- 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: local date, investigation status, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2019-03-15.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 2e89089883e31f943770f353f593b01c0cfd365c2d002b4d9fead45a6f9a51dc; retrieved 2026-09-16T08:40:12.660Z.