WPR11LA143 · Mooney M20F
Mooney M20F · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing
From Mesquite Airport (67L) to J. Randy McKnight Nephi Municipal Airport (U14)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR11LA143
- 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 M20F
- 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
- N891X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Mesquite Airport (67L), Mesquite, NVTo J. Randy McKnight Nephi Municipal Airport (U14), Nephi, UT
- 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
- Loss of control on ground
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Before the accident flight, the pilot diverted to an alternate airport due to inclement weather. While landing, the pilot felt a shimmy in the landing gear but reported that the landing was otherwise normal. The pilot did not inspect the landing gear. On the accident flight, the pilot flew to his intended airport and decided to conduct a soft-field landing; he lowered the nose landing gear after the main landing gear touched down. Upon contact with the runway, the nose landing gear began to shimmy. The airplane veered to the left of the runway and the pilot attempted to return it to runway centerline. The nose landing gear then collapsed, and the airplane continued off the runway and into a snow bank, where the nose gear was sheared off.
The pilot reported that when he purchased the airplane the year before, he had felt a similar shimmy in the landing gear. He further stated that 2 weeks before the accident, the airplane had gone through an annual inspection during which the landing gear actuator had been sent out for overhaul. The pilot had flown the airplane about 10 hours since the inspection. The cause of the nose gear failure was not determined because postaccident examination could not determine if the damage occurred before the impact with the snow bank or during the accident sequence.
Probable cause
The failure of the nose gear during landing for reasons that could not be determined due to postaccident damage.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR11LA143
- Event ID
- 20110223X03211
- Case number
- WPR11LA143
- 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: 5532a0f34a89ccd5af49f8b7ee187d1cc9b6c896a9e6897d73853e32f3fe5699; retrieved 2026-09-15T15:50:13.473Z.