ERA22LA296 · American Champion Aircraft 8KCAB
Super D Aviation Training American Champion Aircraft 8KCAB · Accident: system/component malfunction/failure (non-power) during landing
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA22LA296
- 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
American Champion Aircraft 8KCAB
- Aircraft type
- American Champion 8
- 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
- N721SD
- Operator
- Super D Aviation Training
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 29 years (built 1993)
- 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
- System/component malfunction/failure (non-power)
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After performing maneuvers in the local area, the pilot receiving instruction and the flight instructor returned to the departure airport and performed two practice landings. During the third landing, the flight instructor heard a “bang” noise and the airplane veered left away from the runway centerline. The airplane came to rest in the grass next to the runway and the airplane’s fuselage and rudder were substantially damaged. A Federal Aviation Administration inspector examined the airplane after the accident. The airplane’s left main landing gear had collapsed and the inspector found that the left main landing gear through bolt was fractured. The inspector further reported that the airplane’s most recent annual inspection had been completed more than 22 months before the accident. Additionally, the airframe manufacturer’s maintenance manual required that the through bolt be removed and inspected at every 100 hour/annual inspection and replaced as necessary, in addition to a mandatory replacement every 500 hours. The airplane’s maintenance records did not show when the last though bolt change had occurred. Based on this information, it is likely that the landing gear collapsed due to a failure of the left main landing gear through bolt, and that the through bolt had likely not been maintained in accordance with the airframe manufacturer’s requirements.
Probable cause
The inadequate maintenance of the left main landing gear through bolt, which resulted in a left main landing gear collapse and subsequent runway excursion during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA22LA296
- Event ID
- 20220701105404
- Case number
- ERA22LA296
- 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: bda47900b0168e038d28b04509e851cd994b84921fd3dd591a83f607db7bf1f0; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:24:48.023Z.