CEN23LA200 · Flight Design Gmbh CTSW
Flight Design Gmbh CTSW · Accident: hard landing
From Grosse Ile Municipal Airport (KONZ) to Richmond Field (69G)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN23LA200
- 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
- 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
Flight Design Gmbh CTSW
- Aircraft type
- Flight Design CTSW
- 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
- N165CT
- Operator
- Cameron Michael F
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Grosse Ile Municipal Airport (KONZ), Grosse Ile Township, MITo Richmond Field (69G), Gregory, MI
- Aircraft age
- About 17 years (built 2006)
- 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 structures
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
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 was landing on a grass runway with a slight right quartering tailwind. During the landing, the nose landing gear bounced after touchdown then separated from the airplane. The airplane nosed over and came to rest inverted. The fuselage and empennage sustained substantial damage. Metallurgical examination of the nose landing gear rotation unit revealed the fracture surfaces were consistent with shear overstress. A review of the maintenance logbooks revealed that the nose landing gear had been replaced two previous times due to hard landing events. No anomalies were noted with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. It is likely that the landing was harder than the pilot perceived, which resulted in the shear overstress of the nose landing gear.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper landing flare that resulted in a hard, bounced landing and subsequent overstress failure of the nose landing gear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN23LA200
- Event ID
- 20230524192230
- Case number
- CEN23LA200
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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: 662f3d52a96dab4d2c305fe2ac7326635fd1dcd7e963baa2178bf5067391845d; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:38:15.868Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: departure. City misspelled with an l for an I; KONZ is Grosse Ile Municipal Airport at Grosse Ile Township, MI.