Nemly Aviation Eclipse Aviation Corp EA500 accident
Eclipse Aviation Corp EA500 · Accident: landing gear collapse while taxiing
From Sacramento Executive Airport (SAC) to San Francisco International Airport (SFO)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR15LA184
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
Eclipse Aviation Corp EA500
- Aircraft type
- Eclipse EA500
- 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
- N508JA
- Operator
- Nemly Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sacramento Executive Airport (SAC), Sacramento, CATo San Francisco International Airport (SFO), San Francisco, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 9 years (built 2006)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Organizational issues › Development
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the airline transport pilot and the commercial pilot, the airplane was taxiing to the runway when they heard a loud bang and the airplane veered to the left. The pilots contacted the tower controller, who informed them that the airplane was leaking a large amount of fuel onto the tarmac. The pilots shut down the airplane and evacuated the passengers. Further examination of the airplane revealed that the left main landing gear trunnion had punctured the left wing.
Postaccident examination revealed that the left main landing gear assembly had fractured due to a fatigue crack that emanated from a sharp corner of a machined feature on the inner surface of the trunnion. The deep machining gouge mark was likely the result of an error in cleaning operation during manufacture; the cleaning tool could have extended deeper into the tapered inner surface than intended and created the deep machine gouge mark. The fatigue crack initiated on the inside of the tube and grew to a crucial size without reaching the outer wall of the tube. As a result, the crack would not have been visible during a visual inspection.
The manufacturer reported that, following the accident, they identified a systemic manufacturing defect that potentially affected the entire fleet. A mandatory service bulletin was issued to address the problem, as well as the initiation of a fleet-wide inspection and landing gear trunnion repair/replacement program.
Probable cause
A manufacturing defect that resulted in fatigue failure of the left main landing gear trunnion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR15LA184
- Event ID
- 20150615X00136
- Case number
- WPR15LA184
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2015-06-12.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d74611b017ee90c18873386e7400eebb12b0c952595c9fd2536f0958a0003a06; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:25:12.596Z.