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Commentary from a knowledgeable viewer: 

"Just a bit of info regarding this incident.  I'm an Aircraft Mechanic with Frontier Airlines and since this incident, Airbus has found out that one of BF Goodrich's vendors who manufactures that portion of the strut for the A320 family of aircraft had used an unapproved material to cast the NLG centering locks." 

"When an Airbus or any other passenger jet takes off the NLG automatically centers itself to be retracted and remains centered until the aircraft is back on the ground with its weight on the wheels.   However, a specific batch of the NLG struts that was in question would wear out at an exponentially faster rate and the locks would snap off, allowing the NLG to turn 90 degrees sideways."

"Since this incident, Airbus and the FAA have issued an AD (Airworthiness Directive) pertaining to aircraft with this particular batch of NLG's installed. Frontier's fleet had 8 affected aircraft, 4 of which were very close to this same outcome. Thanks to Airbus' speedy response, all affected aircraft now have new NLG installed."

New 4/8/06:

Commentary from a BF Goodrich employee: 

"Good day! You have an excellent site here – very popular among the Goodrich Landing Gear employees. I must make a slight correction to the comments by one of your contributors regarding the Landing Gear failure on the A320 last September: your commentator indicates that the gear that failed was manufactured by BF Goodrich, but that is incorrect – Goodrich does not make the landing gear for the A320. That landing gear is produced by our esteemed competitors Messier-Dowty. Setting industry competition aside, I must congratulate Messier-Dowty on the quality of their gear – the pintle pins that attach the gear into the airframe would never have been designed to handle the extreme loads of landing with the wheels sideways, so the pins should have failed, folding the gear backwards and dropping the nose of the aircraft onto the runway. Instead, the pins held and allowed a safe landing in spite of the centering system failure. Excellent work!"