CEN21LA108 · Cirrus Design Corp SR20
Plane Smart! Aviation Cirrus Design Corp SR20 · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Addison Airport (ADS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN21LA108
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
Cirrus Design Corp SR20
- Aircraft type
- Cirrus SR20
- 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
- N720TX
- Operator
- Plane Smart! Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Addison Airport (ADS), Addison, TXTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 15 years (built 2005)
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Just after touchdown during landing, the airplane’s nose landing gear collapsed, which resulted in substantial damage to the engine firewall. Examination revealed that the gear strut separated near the top of the assembly. Video of the landing was not consistent with a hard landing.
The airplane had experienced a hard landing about 2 months before the accident landing, after which it was inspected in accordance with the manufacturer’s hard landing checklist. The accident landing was the fourth landing since being returned to service. The nose landing gear strut assembly was not retained and provided for metallurgical examination. It could not be determined if the strut failed due to damage from the previous hard landing or another hard landing before the accident flight.
Probable cause
A failure of the nose wheel landing strut for reasons that could not be determined based on available information.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN21LA108
- Event ID
- 20210104102489
- Case number
- CEN21LA108
- 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, coordinates, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2020-11-06.
- API snapshot SHA-256: f135b7dd2af61e56ec1434b6427d233f9f4f09021f127189929e52329cf775f4; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:32:31.668Z.