CEN23LA110 · Titan TORNADO II
Titan TORNADO II · Accident: system/component malfunction/failure (non-power) during takeoff
From Fredenberg Township, MN to Cloquet Carlton County Airport (KCOQ)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN23LA110
- 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
Titan TORNADO II
- Aircraft type
- Titan TORNADO
- 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
- N9168P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fredenberg Township, MNTo Cloquet Carlton County Airport (KCOQ), Cloquet, MN
- Aircraft age
- About 16 years (built 2007)
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot stated that while taking off on a frozen lake with hard-packed snow, the right main landing gear separated from the airplane. He continued the takeoff and landed the airplane without further incident on a snow-covered lake near his home. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the vertical stabilizer due to impact from the right main landing gear. A metallurgical examination of the right main landing gear leg assembly revealed that bilateral fatigue cracks originated from the inner wall of a cross-drilled hole near the right gear leg socket. Eventually, overload and bending stresses in the direction of the fatigue cracks resulted in the right gear leg separating. It was unclear why the hole was drilled. There is an identical hole in the same spot on the left landing gear leg.
Probable cause
The fatigue failure of the right landing gear leg that resulted in its separation from the airplane during takeoff.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN23LA110
- Event ID
- 20230221106748
- Case number
- CEN23LA110
- 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, coordinates, 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: cb51da016de6c7101a19a2166c0f5607be360c1897f809297dec53da67cee766; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:20:50.673Z.