WPR15IA105 · EVO13 LLC LANCAIR EVOLUTION
WR Brody EVO13 LLC LANCAIR EVOLUTION · Incident: landing gear collapse
From Gillespie Field (SEE) to San Carlos Airport (SQL)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR15IA105
- 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
- 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
EVO13 LLC LANCAIR EVOLUTION
- Aircraft type
- Evo13 LANCAIR EVOLUTION
- 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
- N3WB
- Operator
- WR Brody
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gillespie Field (SEE), San Diego, CATo San Carlos Airport (SQL), San Carlos, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 2 years (built 2013)
- 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
- Minor
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that, during the landing roll, the nose landing gear (NLG) began to shimmy, which quickly became severe. The pilot applied back pressure on the control stick to reduce the weight on the NLG; however, the NLG collapsed about 2 to 3 seconds later. The airplane then skidded on the runway for about 1,000 ft before coming to a stop upright.
A postincident examination of the NLG revealed that the right trunnion pin had separated at the base of the pin where it connected to the NLG strut arm. The fracture surface had unified crack fronts, consistent with fatigue crack progression. The fatigue cracks initiated from multiple origins on opposite sides of the trunnion pin, consistent with reverse-bending fatigue. Although the reverse bending could have resulted from the exceedance of the lateral limits of the tow bar parameters during ground towing operations, it could not be determined if such an exceedance occurred before the incident. The event that precipitated the reverse bending could not be determined.
Probable cause
The collapse of the nose landing gear (NLG) due to the separation of the right trunnion pin from the NLG strut as a result of reverse-bending fatigue.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR15IA105
- Event ID
- 20150218X92833
- Case number
- WPR15IA105
- 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: be61323943b3976748cfa2cd7689e4787ac0748055eece5f452484e233265e3e; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:05:36.976Z.