ERA17LA054 · Loofbourrow John W RUTAN DEFIANT
Loofbourrow John W RUTAN DEFIANT · Accident: system/component malfunction/failure (non-power) during landing
From South Bend International Airport (SBN) to Morristown Municipal Airport (MMU)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA17LA054
- 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
Loofbourrow John W RUTAN DEFIANT
- Aircraft type
- Loofbourrow John RUTAN DEFIANT
- 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
- N770JL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From South Bend International Airport (SBN), South Bend, INTo Morristown Municipal Airport (MMU), Morristown, NJ
- Aircraft age
- About 13 years (built 2003)
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- System/component malfunction/failure (non-power)
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The experimental amateur-built airplane was landing after an uneventful personal flight. While landing on a runway, the retractable nose landing gear collapsed, the rudder that was mounted on the bottom of the fuselage contacted the runway pavement, substantially damaging it. Postaccident examination of the nose landing gear system revealed that the bottom of the down lock was worn (beveled). When the nose wheel landing gear was extended, the bottom of the down lock, which hooked over a pivot shaft to lock the landing gear down, contacted the pivot shaft around the area of the centerline and did not extend past the centerline of the pivot shaft. Drawings of the assembly’s normal functions indicated that the down lock could move and unlock the landing gear when the assembly was under load. At the time of the accident, the airplane had accumulated about 1,338 landings. Given this information, it is likely that the wear to the nose landing gear down lock allowed the nose landing gear to collapse during the landing.
Probable cause
A collapse of the nose landing gear due to wear in the landing gear extension system.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA17LA054
- Event ID
- 20161123X43330
- Case number
- ERA17LA054
- 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: 8d298d342e23939d1c2d097b72a28856de133f36224a391140e9709bf716f5ed; retrieved 2026-09-16T04:51:21.405Z.