CEN15LA351 · Roberts Bruce W VANS AIRCRAFT RV 9A A
Roberts Bruce W VANS AIRCRAFT RV 9A A · Accident: landing gear collapse
From an unrecorded airport to Kings Land O' Lakes Airport (LNL)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN15LA351
- 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
Roberts Bruce W VANS AIRCRAFT RV 9A A
- Aircraft type
- Roberts Bruce VANS AIRCRAFT RV 9A
- 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
- N142DD
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Kings Land O' Lakes Airport (LNL), Land O' Lakes, WI
- 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 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot and passenger were landing on a grass strip when the airplane landed hard and bounced twice. The nose gear fork embedded in the grass surface, the nose gear collapsed, and the propeller lodged in the soil. The airplane nosed over and came to rest inverted, which resulted in substantial damage to the vertical stabilizer and main spar. Although the pilot thought that the airplane had hit an uneven surface during landing that caused the gear to collapse, an examination of the grass runway did not reveal any irregularities in the surface of the area of the nose gear collapse.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to maintain a proper descent rate, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN15LA351
- Event ID
- 20150812X05042
- Case number
- CEN15LA351
- 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: c083a3b2f249b3d759eb9ae4b14ffa1493dce60e6461e59b7f0d524ca7b551db; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:39:30.795Z.