ERA12LA296 · Jones SA105
Jones SA105 · Accident: landing gear collapse while taxiing
From New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport (EVB) to New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport (EVB)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12LA296
- 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
Jones SA105
- Aircraft type
- Jones SA105
- 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
- N320WJ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport (EVB), New Smyrna Beach, FLTo New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport (EVB), New Smyrna Beach, FL
- 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
- Taxi · to runway
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The ground controller instructed the pilot to taxi the airplane to the active runway. The pilot stated that the taxiway that he was instructed to taxi on was “very rough,” so he elected to taxi the airplane in the grass as he had done several times before. When the nose gear came in contact with the grass area, the pilot heard a loud noise, and the nose landing gear collapsed. An examination of the wreckage revealed that the airplane’s wood structure fractured at the nose gear assembly attachment location, which ripped through the bottom fuselage area under the rudder pedals section. After the wood structure of the nose gear assembly fractured, the surrounding structure was unable to support the load on the nose landing gear, which resulted in the nose landing gear collapse. According to a mechanic who performed work on the airplane, the wooden design of the airplane was not able to support the loads for that type of landing gear system.
Probable cause
The failure of the nose landing gear wooden attachment/support structure, which resulted in collapse of the nose landing gear during taxi. Contributing to the accident was the improper design of the nose landing gear attachment structure.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12LA296
- Event ID
- 20120422X01441
- Case number
- ERA12LA296
- 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: a4a02d3500340ea0829823f4ed45ef2c058f5704ca038b2e3e0870dc3769f34a; retrieved 2026-09-15T17:51:06.386Z.