Altec Industries has recalled 6,780 aerial devices because the step operators use to climb onto the platform may have been welded poorly enough to come apart under load. The filing, registered with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as campaign 26V637 and carried by Altec as CSN-3374, covers five product lines built between 2020 and 2026.
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Owners will not hear from the company until late November, and the remedy is a free replacement step. The record shows one broken step in the field and no injuries.
The weld between the step tube and the mounting plate
The defect, as Truck Parts & Service reported it in its weekly roundup of commercial-vehicle recalls, is that the turntable-mounted platform access step “may have been improperly welded between the step tube and mounting plate.” The consequence is stated just as plainly: a step that separates or becomes unstable while in use increases the risk of a fall or injury. A turntable is the rotating base of a bucket truck, so the step sits on the part of the machine that crews climb every working day.
Altec’s own account, set out in its Part 573 safety report to NHTSA, shows how the problem surfaced. On September 1, 2026, a customer reported that a step had broken while an operator was using it. The next day Altec opened root-cause and field-action investigations and contained the steps it still had on hand. On September 3 company staff met the owner, inspected steps and replaced those that failed a visual weld inspection. From September 15 a Certified Welding Inspector examined welds, including magnetic particle testing, and destructive testing was run on steps that had been returned. The inspector’s final report reached Altec on September 17, and on September 25 the company determined that a potential defect existed in certain units and decided to run a field campaign. The report was submitted to NHTSA on October 2.
The timeline is short. From a broken step on September 1 to a recall decision on September 25 took 24 days, and the decision rested on welding inspections and destructive testing of returned parts rather than on a pile of complaints. Altec filed its report with NHTSA within a week of deciding, and the agency acknowledged it five days after that, so the paper trail from first failure to a federal campaign number covers about five weeks. For equipment that crews climb on at the start of every shift, that sequence matters less as a speed record than as a description of how a single field failure turned into a population-wide action.
Five Altec product lines and the units in each
The recall names the Altec AA Series Aerial Device (2020-2026 model years), the AN Series (2021-2026), the AM Series (2023-2026), the Digger Derrick (2024-2026) and the A-Class (2024-2025). Altec’s report breaks the 6,780 units down by line: 5,444 AA Series, 1,075 AN Series, 246 AM Series, 12 A-Class and 3 Digger Derrick units. The AA Series therefore accounts for roughly four of every five vehicles in the campaign, which means the practical exposure sits with fleets that run that boom family, such as utilities and tree-care contractors.
Not every one of those vehicles is expected to carry a bad weld. Altec estimates that about 55 percent of the 6,780 units actually have the defect, and the company is recalling the full population because it cannot tell from the outside which steps are sound. The report states that no other warranty claims, field reports, accidents, injuries or deaths were identified beyond the September 1 breakage.
Free replacement steps and a November 27 mailing
Altec will replace the affected steps with newly built, conforming steps at no charge. The company plans to mail owner notification letters on November 27, 2026, and it has filed the action as a phased recall with no interim owner notification planned. Until a letter arrives or a fleet manager checks the lookup, the filing gives owners no interim instruction at all.
NHTSA’s acknowledgment letter to Altec, dated October 7, 2026, confirms receipt of the October 2 filing and the campaign number. It also reminds the company of the standing federal rule that affected equipment may not be sold until it has been remedied, which matters for dealers and for fleets that buy used units. The letter was signed by Alex Ansley, chief of NHTSA’s Recall Management Division, and lists Altec customer service at 1-877-462-5832 and the NHTSA Vehicle Safety Hotline at 1-888-327-4236.
Fleet managers who do not want to wait for a mailing can look up the campaign through NHTSA’s campaign record for 26V637 or its recall lookup page using a vehicle identification number. Because the recall is phased, individual trucks may reach the front of the replacement queue at different times, so a written inspection routine for the platform step in the meantime costs little.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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