CEN23LA208 · Luscombe 8E
Luscombe 8E · Accident: landing gear collapse
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN23LA208
- 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
Luscombe 8E
- Aircraft type
- Luscombe 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
- N2515K
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 76 years (built 1947)
- 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
- 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
The conventional geared airplane’s right main landing gear collapsed during landing and the airplane’s left wing sustained substantial damage. The pilot reported that the flight instructor performed the final landing and that the landing was very hard. The flight instructor reported that he landed on centerline and as the airplane was rolling out the right main landing gear collapsed. He noted that there were no brakes in the right seat pilot station where he was located. Metallurgical examination of the failed landing gear revealed corrosion on the inside of the main landing gear tube in the area where it was welded to the wheel axle. The corrosion progressively thinned the leg tube walls over time and caused pitting and microcracking on the tube interior. The combination of missing material, pitting, and microcracks led to an overstress fracture of the leg at this location on the final landing, which led to two other subsequent overstress fractures. The Federal Aviation Administration issued a special airworthiness information bulletin (SAIB), CE-17-14, to alert operators of this and other similar model airplanes of the need to inspect and address corrosion issues on main landing gear. The SAIB recommended following the procedures of the Don Luscombe Aviation History Foundation Service Recommendation No. 4, dated Jan. 22, 1996, which provided instructions for installing a drain hole in the lower portion of the leg, performing repetitive inspections of the gear legs for corrosion, and cleaning and sealing the gear legs’ internal surfaces. Compliance with the SAIB is not mandatory. Limited maintenance records were available during the investigation; however, the most recent annual inspection entry did not indicate that the landing gear were inspected for corrosion. The fractured main landing gear did not have drain holes as noted in the service recommendation, indicating that that procedures in the service recommendation had not been performed. Based on the available evidence the accident was the result of failure of the right main landing gear leg due to weakening from prolonged internal corrosion of the landing gear tube, which weakened the leg.
Probable cause
Failure of the right main landing gear due to prolonged corrosion of the landing gear tube, which weakened the gear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN23LA208
- Event ID
- 20230530192255
- Case number
- CEN23LA208
- 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 2023-05-19.
- API snapshot SHA-256: f6be51e62d18e0d382fc1c891e9cf7c36eabcb241a96ce9df392c85af7989345; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:39:02.865Z.