- Joined
- Sep 25, 2015
- Messages
- 66
- Reaction score
- 26
After over 50 years of flying I had my first incident (accident) on Thursday. Landing at my home grass field, I thought I hit a runway light causing the gear to collapse. My first costly pilot error? On further investigating of the runway damage and the gear struts, the gear failed before I hit the runway light. Not a pilot error but a design error on my part. As a retired system engineer I am not sure what hurts worse - pilot or design error! Last year I replaced the bungee struts with Wag Aero spring struts. I was responsible for the design of the attachments. I turned some solid steel rods to fit the ends of the tube and connected them to the gear and the fuse with bolts. After fitting them, I forgot to remove them and weld the inserts into the tubes. The bolts pulled through the thin tubing causing the gear failure. The runway light did little damage, the belly landing caused a lot more damage.
