CEN19LA322 · Cessna 195A
Cessna 195A · Accident: part(s) separation from aircraft during landing
From Bismarck Municipal Airport (BIS) to Pocahontas Municipal Airport (POH)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN19LA322
- 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 195A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 195
- 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
- N9895A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bismarck Municipal Airport (BIS), Bismarck, NDTo Pocahontas Municipal Airport (POH), Pocahontas, IA
- Aircraft age
- About 69 years (built 1950)
- 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
- 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
- Part(s) separation from aircraft
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot reported that, upon landing, he immediately felt a shift to the left. The left main landing gear fractured and collapsed, and the airplane went off the runway. Postaccident metallurgical examination of the landing gear revealed that the fracture occurred from a thumbnail-shaped fatigue crack in the gear spring strut with multiple origins near the inboard attachment location at the forward edge of its upper surface. Final overstress fracture propagation direction was consistent with a downward-and-aft bending failure mode; thus, the fracture was more likely due to overload rather than the fatigue crack. This was consistent with drag loading of the left main landing gear wheel in combination with side-loading of the outboard side of the left main landing gear wheel, such as that encountered during a crosswind landing, ground loop, and/or hard left turn event. The loads experienced by the landing gear during the accident landing could not be determined, and a structural analysis was not performed to determine if the loads exceeded design load limitations.
Probable cause
Overload failure of the left main landing gear during landing, which resulted in a loss of directional control.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN19LA322
- Event ID
- 20190906X41941
- Case number
- CEN19LA322
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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, 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: 21d58974e26a03e9193224a0745de78c6657975a811af543d516c88d935b339d; retrieved 2026-09-16T10:00:09.750Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: departure. BIS is Bismarck Municipal Airport, Bismarck, ND; 'Bismark' is a misspelling.