CEN15LA411 · Brown Mark SPACE WALKER II
Brown Mark SPACE WALKER II · Accident: hard landing
From St Louis Downtown Airport (CPS) to St Louis Downtown Airport (CPS)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN15LA411
- 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
Brown Mark SPACE WALKER II
- Aircraft type
- Brown Mark SPACE WALKER
- 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
- N43904
- Operator
- Robert L McDaniel · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From St Louis Downtown Airport (CPS), Cahokia, ILTo St Louis Downtown Airport (CPS), Cahokia, IL
- Aircraft age
- About 17 years (built 1998)
- 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
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot and flight instructor were conducting a familiarization flight in the tailwheel-equipped, amateur-built airplane. After completing area maneuvers, the pilot executed two touch-and-go landings. The flight instructor reported that, during the third landing attempt, he noticed that the airplane had developed a high sink rate, so he subsequently took control of the airplane and initiated a go-around as the airplane touched down hard, which damaged the left main landing gear (MLG) and tailwheel attachment spring. The flight instructor was unable to maintain directional control, and the airplane departed the left side of the runway, which further damaged the left MLG.
Examination of the left MLG revealed that it failed at the point of a previous weld repair, which was on the lower tube of a multitube group weld and was only partially welded. The improperly welded tube resulted in less-than-intended design strength and contributed to the failure of the left MLG.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain a proper descent rate during the attempted landing and the flight instructor's delayed attempt to execute a go-around, which resulted in a hard landing, failure of the left main landing gear, and subsequent loss of directional control. Contributing to the accident was an improperly welded landing gear tube.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN15LA411
- Event ID
- 20150914X10322
- Case number
- CEN15LA411
- 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, coordinates. 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: 11c101d70815b78b7771506bca159ca42554dc8118e40fd8f4b9b7f1404fdf4b; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:46:11.179Z.