DFW06LA216 · Weber Venture
Weber Venture · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From McKinney National Airport (TKI) to El Paso International Airport (ELP)
Event
- NTSB case
- DFW06LA216
- 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
- Accident
- 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
- 1 · 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
Weber Venture
- Aircraft type
- Weber VENTURE
- 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
- N5QE
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From McKinney National Airport (TKI), MC KINNEY, TXTo El Paso International Airport (ELP), El Paso, TX
- 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
- Landing · landing roll
- 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
- Loss of control on ground/water
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Kit manufacturer › Landing gear, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The amateur airplane nosed-over after landing on runway 22 (150-foot wide by 12,020-foot long asphalt runway). Witnesses reported that the airplane was reported to have either "jerked violently to the left" or "wobbled from side to side" upon touchdown. The airplane then continued to taxi down the runway for about 7,000 feet before the airplane nosed-over and came to rest in an inverted position on the runway. Correct air/oil ratio and strut inflation is critical for the proper operation of the landing gear strut. An improperly inflated strut reportedly result's in a "spongy" strut, which can aggravate directional control problems on the airplane. The original nose landing gear consists of a strut with a single-rod steering system and the design is absent gear scissors and/or a shimmy damper. A recommendation issued for the prevention of nose wheel shimming recommends for pilots to "lower the nose tire promptly, and keep it on the ground with forward stick pressure if necessary." The kit manufacturer offers an optional kit to upgrade the main gear strut air/oil ratio, making the strut more "rigid." The landing gear arrangement on the accident airplane was the original configuration, except a small spring had been added to the steering fork and a hydraulic operating steering system, activated by a switch on the control stick, had been added by the builder. However, a scissor-link/shimmy dampener was not added. In addition, the builder had not incorporated the addition of a canopy frame or a rollover bar. The main landing gear struts were also reported to be inflated to about one-and-a-half inches, instead of the recommended three-eighths to one-half inch of extension.
Probable cause
The aircraft's inadequate landing gear design, which resulted in a loss of directional control and subsequent nose-over. A factor was the owner/builder's failure to incorporate modifications to the landing gear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DFW06LA216
- Event ID
- 20061003X01442
- Case number
- DFW06LA216
- 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. 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: c909851c505b2f04a6d3873c7f95dfc2c35ee2a66c06023d526bf37fe1f1fe2c; retrieved 2026-09-20T17:02:23.574Z.