Southwest Airlines Flight 341
Boeing 737 3G7 · Incident: aircraft structural failure during landing
From Harry Reid International Airport (KLAS) to Los Angeles International Airport (KLAX)
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG09IA014
- 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
- 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
Boeing 737 3G7
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 737
- 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
- N670SW
- Operator
- Southwest Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Harry Reid International Airport (KLAS), Las Vegas, NVTo Los Angeles International Airport (KLAX), Los Angeles, CA
- 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
- 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
- Aircraft structural 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During landing, the inboard axle of the right main landing gear separated from the airplane. The crew taxied the airplane off the runway and the passengers and crew deplaned with no injuries. Examination of the axle revealed an area of fatigue cracking emanating from the brake mounting bolt hole at the 12:00 position. The fatigue crack likely initiated in an area where there was scoring and fretting damage to the Sermetal coating. In-service examination of brake mounting bolt torque indicated that over time, the brake mounting bolts may loosen allowing the bolts to spin in the holes.
Probable cause
The failure of the right main landing gear inboard axle due to fatigue cracking as a result of fretting damage in one of the brake mounting bolt holes.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG09IA014
- Event ID
- 20090909X82446
- Case number
- ENG09IA014
- 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. 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: 7641e76676cf549b3d2afe30f5b86a9d7d121fb460f33babbaec51a325183d3d; retrieved 2026-09-15T12:56:54.308Z.