WPR19LA169 · Cessna 140 Undesignat
Cessna 140 Undesignat · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Newport Municipal Airport (ONP) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR19LA169
- 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 Undesignat
- 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
- N73053
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Newport Municipal Airport (ONP), Newport, ORTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 73 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 oper/perf/capability
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the instructor, the accident landing was the second landing of the flight. As the tailwheel-equipped airplane was slowing down and they were exiting the runway, there was a loud "clunk." The airplane slid sideways, bounced, and then ground looped, resulting in substantial damage to the fuselage. The instructor reported that the right wheel assembly separated at the axle. Examination of the fractured axle assembly revealed that the axle fractured at the transition radius between the longitudinal barrel (tube) portion and the plate portion. A fatigue crack emanated from multiple origins at the outer surface of the transition radius and extended circumferentially around the outer surface of the transition radius. The fracture features outside of the fatigue region showed features consistent with overstress separation. The maintenance history of the landing gear and axle could not be determined. The fatigue crack started at the transition radius most likely as the result of a hard landing or several hard landings. Once the fatigue crack started, the crack propagated during taxiing and additional takeoffs and landings.
Probable cause
Fatigue failure of the right landing gear axle, which resulted in a loss of control during the landing roll.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR19LA169
- Event ID
- 20190612X03140
- Case number
- WPR19LA169
- 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, cause areas. 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: 169d39cbb5894107f9ce8ff0e05926402d9ef6b7b49472381a689bac7a390452; retrieved 2026-09-16T09:15:09.039Z.