CEN18LA180 · Roger G White Glasair FT
Roger G White Glasair FT · Accident: system/component malfunction/failure (non-power) during landing
From Vance Brand Airport (LMO) to Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (BJC)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN18LA180
- 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
Roger G White Glasair FT
- Aircraft type
- Roger G White GLASAIR
- 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
- N4EJ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Vance Brand Airport (LMO), Longmont, COTo Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (BJC), Broomfield, CO
- Aircraft age
- About 28 years (built 1990)
- 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
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot reported that, during the landing roll, the experimental, amateur-built airplane started drifting to the left and he applied right rudder to correct. He subsequently attempted to apply right brake pressure to further correct for the drift as the airplane was traveling about 50 knots. At that time, the right brake pedal "went to the floor," and there was "zero" right brake available. The airplane departed the left side of the runway, crossed the grass, and came to rest on the parallel taxiway.
A postrecovery examination revealed that the plastic right brake line was broken near the upper end of the landing gear strut. The airplane was equipped with a free-castering nosewheel and did not have any nosewheel steering capability. Directional control during ground operations was maintained with differential braking. As a result, maintaining directional control after the brake failure was not possible.
Probable cause
The failure of the right brake line, which resulted in a loss of directional control and runway excursion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN18LA180
- Event ID
- 20180518X70645
- Case number
- CEN18LA180
- 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: ebf910008370fa64419913efdeb962568fdb85a8453a88dd2d19f85d75b2ebd7; retrieved 2026-09-16T07:11:49.728Z.