ERA19LA073 · Learjet 35 A
Medway Air Ambulance Learjet 35 A · Accident: windshear or thunderstorm during landing
From Gwinnett County Briscoe Field (LZU) to Key West International Airport (EYW)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA19LA073
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Learjet 35 A
- Aircraft type
- Learjet 35
- 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
- N55FN
- Operator
- Medway Air Ambulance
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gwinnett County Briscoe Field (LZU), Lawrenceville, GATo Key West International Airport (EYW), Key West, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 40 years (built 1978)
- 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
- Windshear or thunderstorm
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight crew conducted an instrument approach to their destination airport that terminated in a missed approach. Air traffic control provided radar vectors for a second approach, and during that time, the wind shifted due to the passage of a cold front and favored the opposite direction runway. The subsequent approach was uneventful; however, during the landing flare, the airplane touched down hard and was substantially damaged. Review of a weather sounding taken shortly before the accident revealed the potential for low-level windshear activity between the surface and 1,000 feet. Given this information, it is most likely that the flight crew encountered windshear during the landing flare, which resulted in a hard landing.
Probable cause
The flight crew’s encounter with windshear during the landing flare, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA19LA073
- Event ID
- 20181220X61418
- Case number
- ERA19LA073
- 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: 06c0075d5aa43630aa880c06d6abc3951e10c57326648765a686c119f4e0b405; retrieved 2026-09-16T08:30:12.101Z.