TWA Flight 327
Lockheed L-1011-385-1 L-1011-385 · Incident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From Orlando International Airport (MCO) to St. Louis Lambert International Airport (STL)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI97IA134
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- Airline
- 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
Lockheed L-1011-385-1 L-1011-385
- Aircraft type
- Lockheed L-1011
- 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
- N11003
- Operator
- TWA
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Orlando International Airport (MCO), Orlando, FLTo St. Louis Lambert International Airport (STL)
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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 121: Air Carrier
- 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
- En route · climb to cruise
- First occurrenceThe 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
- Airframe, component or system failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Company maintenance personnel › Maintenance, installation, improper
- Miscellaneous, bolt/nut/fastener/clamp/spring › Missing
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
About 28 minutes after takeoff, while climbing through FL290, the flight crew heard a loud bang of short duration. A check of the airplane was performed with no abnormalities discovered, except for a slight vibration near the left wing area. Postflight examination of the airplane revealed the left main landing gear strut door had separated from the airplane. Also under-wing damage was noted in that area. There was evidence that initial failure of the door mounting points occurred when the crew heard the loud noise, but final separation of the door occurred during final approach for landing. The door landed in downtown Saint Louis. During examination of the door's lower forward mounting bracket, rounded threads were found on the mounting eyebolt, and associated hardware was missing. The missing hardware consisted of a spacer, washer, castellated nut and cotter pin. All other mounting points had signs of overload fractures. Maintenance was last performed in this area on 5/7/97.
Probable cause
failure of company maintenance personnel to properly install a mounting eyebolt (and associated cotter pin, washer, spacer and castellated nut) on the lower forward bracket of the left main landing gear strut door.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI97IA134
- Event ID
- 20001208X07863
- Case number
- CHI97IA134
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- 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: investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 14b91427b36e6b92e724626459c2f4a8995430d2eb4b55709fdf7b50b76035b4; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:33:37.919Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N11003; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.