LAX08LA184 · Mooney M20J
Mooney M20J · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Garfield County Regional Airport (RIL) to Evanston-Uinta County Airport-Burns Field (EVW)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX08LA184
- 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
- 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
Mooney M20J
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N1234G
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Garfield County Regional Airport (RIL), Rifle, COTo Evanston-Uinta County Airport-Burns Field (EVW), Evanston, WY
- 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
- Defining eventThe 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
- Landing gear collapse
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that he extended the landing gear while on approach for landing and got a "gear unsafe" red light indication. He recycled the landing gear and the gear light went out. The pilot called the local fixed base operator on the field and requested a flyby to confirm that the landing gear was down. Ground personnel indicated that the gear appeared to be down. The pilot accomplished the final pre-landing checks and landed the airplane. The landing gear collapsed immediately after touchdown. Postaccident examination of the airplane by a mechanic revealed that two wing skins and a metal tubular former in the belly needed to be replaced. The mechanic who inspected the landing gear stated that the gear collapsed because the over center tension for the nose wheel landing gear down locks was not properly adjusted.
Probable cause
A collapse of the landing gear due to improper maintenance.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX08LA184
- Event ID
- 20080618X00878
- Case number
- LAX08LA184
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: 4ae83e7e33ad8860768f745844da66bd7ea072d29d82eb75bea51580fa10f946; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:47:05.075Z.