DEN04IA014 · Learjet 45
Vestar Capital Partners Learjet 45 · Incident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From Teterboro Airport (TEB) to Denver International Airport (DEN)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN04IA014
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
- General aviation
- 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
Learjet 45
- Aircraft type
- Learjet 45
- 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
- N420FX
- Operator
- Vestar Capital Partners
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Teterboro Airport (TEB), Teterburo, NJTo Denver International Airport (DEN), Denver, CO
- 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 91: General Aviation
- 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 · descent
- 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
- None
Cause areas
- Flt control syst, wing spoiler system › Failure
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was descending through 13,000 feet when the captain extended both spoilers as speed brakes to reduce the airplane's speed. The left spoiler came up and the right spoiler barely moved, causing the airplane to roll to the left. The pilots saw the amber-colored "Spoiler Fail CAS" light illuminate. The captain retracted the spoilers, rolled the airplane back to a level attitude, and began running the appropriate emergency checklist. The captain continued the descent and landed uneventfully. An examination of the airplane showed high internal resistance in the left and right spoilers' actuator coils. No other anomalies were found.
Probable cause
the failure of the airplane's spoiler system when used as speed brakes due to high resistances in the spoilers' actuator coils.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN04IA014
- Event ID
- 20031029X01828
- Case number
- DEN04IA014
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- 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, coordinates, damage. 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: c0c0c3169fe95396f6ebe6ec2023fa8a3d5227d010d642fe567de3918d658c74; retrieved 2026-09-22T08:17:46.597Z.