CEN21LA416 · Cessna 175
Cessna 175 · Accident: hard landing
From Wall Municipal Airport (6V4) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN21LA416
- 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
Cessna 175
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 175
- 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
- N9343B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Wall Municipal Airport (6V4), Wall, SDTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 63 years (built 1958)
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 pilot reported the airplane touched down “with a gentle skip then easing forward on the yoke pinned my main gear firmly on the turf.” During the landing roll, the airplane began to veer to the right, and the pilot applied rudder inputs to correct. The airplane subsequently spun around and came to rest upright with the left main landing gear leg separated. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the left wing and main landing gear box structure. An attachment bolt for the left main landing gear strut was found fractured and separated from the strut. Metallurgical examination of the fractured bolt and the landing gear strut plate revealed the bolt fractured due to tensile overload that led to shearing of the bolt threads. The bolt was fully threaded into the self-locking nut plate and there was no evidence of looseness before the failure. The damage pattern of the fractured bolt and bent strut plate were consistent with an overload failure of the inboard attachment with no evidence of any preexisting damage or weakness in the attachment. It is likely the main landing gear failure was the result of excessive loading on the attachment during the landing.
Probable cause
The tensile overload failure of the main landing gear attachment bolt, which resulted in separation of the left main landing gear and a loss of control during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN21LA416
- Event ID
- 20210913103845
- Case number
- CEN21LA416
- 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: d110b72c90811d99e2db2dd3137f6df603695a92e8d637f707cc4ebd9f70419a; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:31:06.037Z.