According to the pilot, during the approach to land on a snow-covered runway at the airport in Port Alsworth, Alaska, he selected a touchdown point near what he had identified as the runway threshold.
On short final a pilot-rated passenger seated in the right front seat of the Beech A36 recommended adding power. The pilot assumed this was to “cushion” the landing, not realizing he was landing short of the runway’s plowed surface.
Subsequently, the airplane touched down in an area of unplowed snow, hit a snow berm, and the nosewheel collapsed.
The airplane sustained substantial damage to the fuselage.
In the recommendation section of the NTSB Accident/Incident Reporting Form 6120.1, the pilot said the accident may have been prevented if there were clear runway threshold markings to define the runway’s plowed surface.
According to the operator, cones are normally used to identify the runway threshold, however they had been removed due to ongoing snow removal operations on the day of the accident.
Probable Cause: The pilot’s misidentification of the airport’s active runway, which resulted in an off-runway landing and a collision with a snow berm. Contributing to the accident was the runway’s lack of identifying markings.
To download the final report. Click here. This will trigger a PDF download to your device.
This March 2021 accident report is provided by the National Transportation Safety Board. Published as an educational tool, it is intended to help pilots learn from the misfortunes of others.
Large transport airplanes can afford the extra weight of heavy structure to have super strong landing gear. With light planes weight is a big performance killer. No one wants a slow plane with a high fuel burn. The engineers do a terrific job of the give & take with strength and performance. All of the Bonanzas have very strong gear. But it’s a wonderful design from 70+ years ago.
I have along believed that the FAA doesn’t do a good job dealing with commercial emergency landing situations. Why the heck don’t they require that the undercarriage be able to immediately take on the task of a rapid return to the airfield after a maximum mass takeoff. Why isn’t the undercarriage designed to deal with that much mass on landing? Why all the dumping fuel procedures instead. IF you are emergency return to airfield then let’s return to the runway as soon as we can instead of going out to fly a fuel dumping pattern. GA needs to be similar. Stouter structures and nose wheel assembly to maybe do controlled breakaway.
A low pass.next to the landing area whether talk grass or snow and particularly plowed snow banks take only a few minutes and repairs take weeks or longer.
Reread the article. The runway was plowed. The pilot misidentified the landing area.
Tailwheel aircraft don’t have this nose wheel issue. Seen busted or ripped off nose struts and nose-overs too many times, even from soft field landings.
When the right seater said add power he should also have added you a little low and short of the runway.
So the pilot lands an airplane in a snow bank, not the runway, and it’s the airplane nose wheel designs fault. Seems I have heard this argument before. It’s the items fault not the operator’s fault.
And in Alaska, where unimproved landing areas are more common than improved landing areas.
Score another point for nosewheel collapses. I’m a design engineer and have been responsible for designs which assume sufficient robustness to tolerate stresses well in excess of normal loading. Were I responsible for nosewheel designs as flimsy as most of the standard GA hobby aircraft products seem to have, I’d be fired and horsewhipped, and rightfully slow. Nosewheel assemblies should be designed to take high abnormal stresses such as are experienced by hard landings chronicled weekly on this service and others. There should be no nosing-over landings owing to collapsed nosewheel assemblies. Pathetic. Just pathetic.
Why aren’t they designed like you say?
Because of weight.
The problem exists since the nose gear structure is either mounted on the firewall or the engine mount, which is typical on fixed gear aircraft, since there is no airframe structure forward of the firewall.
Retractable gear should be more robust, but maybe only a little.
So, in this case, the pilot should have done a ‘soft field’ landing, holding the nose gear off as long as possible. He would have been well down the runway before the nose gear touched down. AND, this would add a lot of ‘aero-drag’ , helping slow the aircraft on a short runway.!
[ the Beech A36 would need at least 1800 – 2,000 ft to stop on a snow covered 3,000 ft. runway, so landing close to the approach end is very important ]
The situation is that most nose wheels are 5,00 x 5 or 6.00 x 6 , so bending forces can get very high hitting anything 6 inches high , like a hard snow berm, and there is about 3,000 lb of aircraft weight, moving at 50-60 mph, pushing on the nose gear.
This is like a 3,000 lb car hitting a 12 inch high barrier at 50-60 mph….. both front tires would blow out, and probably damage the struts/ A-arms.
Right, because having them as points of failure rather than having the plane go ass-over-cockpit is a design flaw.