ERA20LA342 · Bellanca 7GCB
Bellanca 7GCB · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Skypark Estates Owners Assoc Airport (18FD) to Skypark Estates Owners Assoc Airport (18FD)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA20LA342
- 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
- 0
- 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
Bellanca 7GCB
- Aircraft type
- Bellanca 7
- 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
- N8950R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Skypark Estates Owners Assoc Airport (18FD), Baker, FLTo Skypark Estates Owners Assoc Airport (18FD), Baker, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 60 years (built 1960)
- 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 systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was performing a touch-and-go landing. After an uneventful touchdown and rollout, and just prior to his application of power to takeoff, the airplane swerved “pretty severely to the right” despite his counter controls. The airplane then veered off the right side of the runway, into the grass and the left main landing gear collapsed under the fuselage, which resulted in substantial damage to the left wing and fuselage. Postaccident examination of the airplane by a Federal Aviation Administration Inspector found that the left main landing gear airframe cross tube had fractured, and a significant amount of corrosion and rust was visible. However, this corrosion was not visible until a section of riveted fairing was removed. Given this information, it is likely that the corroded left main landing gear cross tube failed during the landing, which resulted in a loss of directional control during the takeoff attempt, and a subsequent runway excursion.
Probable cause
The failure of the left landing gear airframe cross tube during landing, due to corrosion hidden under riveted fairing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA20LA342
- Event ID
- 20201005102088
- Case number
- ERA20LA342
- 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, 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: 978bbf56da329dd4417c08f91534e3d2dc50730c32ecb1060645cc8ae69e4a84; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:10:59.075Z.