CEN26LA161 · Flight Design Gmbh CTSW
Flight Design Gmbh CTSW · Accident: landing gear collapse
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN26LA161
- 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
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
- N249CT
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 20 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 · landing roll
- 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 student pilot reported that during the instructional flight the first landing was normal. The second approach and landing were also normal, but the airplane began to veer to the right during the landing rollout. The flight instructor took control of the airplane and performed an aborted landing. After communicating with another pilot who was on the ground at the airport, they determined that the right main landing gear wheel had separated from the airplane. On the subsequent landing, the airplane landed in the grass short of the paved runway, the remnants of the right main landing gear dug into the ground, and the airplane yawed sharply to the right. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the left wing and fuselage. Examination of the airplane after the accident revealed that the welded structure that held the wheel and wheel axle to the round landing gear leg had fractured. The lower portion of the weldment, along with the wheel and brake assembly, were found on the runway. Examination of the weldment showed a buckled portion of tube below the attachment to the round gear leg. The buckling was consistent with a hard landing occurring at some point in the life of the part. There was a complete fracture of the tube just above the buckled section and the interior of the tube was corroded. The fracture surfaces had features consistent with overstress failure. Based on the student pilot’s account and the physical evidence it is likely that the landing gear weldment had previous damage that went undetected until failure during the accident flight.
Probable cause
The failure of the landing gear weldment that resulted in separation of the right main landing gear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN26LA161
- Event ID
- 20260407202771
- Case number
- CEN26LA161
- 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 2026-04-07.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 7a847157d5200cc07ca6e99027235266b70f383528e578aeef27364d8859b9fb; retrieved 2026-09-16T21:10:58.656Z.