Worldwide Jet Charter Learjet 60 accident
Learjet 60 · Accident: runway excursion during landing
From Cuyahoga County Airport (KCGF) to Chicago Executive Airport (KPWK)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA21LA011
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
Learjet 60
- Aircraft type
- Learjet 60
- 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
- N1128M
- Operator
- Worldwide Jet Charter
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cuyahoga County Airport (KCGF), Cleveland, OHTo Chicago Executive Airport (KPWK), Wheeling, IL
- Aircraft age
- About 19 years (built 2001)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Runway excursion
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight crew of the nonscheduled air taxi airplane inadvertently landed on runway 30 instead of runway 34 at Chicago Executive Airport, Wheeling, Illinois. Before departure, the captain conducted a time-of-arrival landing distance assessment and calculated a factored landing distance of 4,790 ft. The landing distance available on runway 34 was 5,001 ft.
During the visual approach to the airport, the flight crew misidentified runway 30 as runway 34; visually aligned with runway 30, which had an available landing distance of 3,983 ft; and used the runway 30 PAPI lights to provide vertical guidance to the runway. Sufficient landing distance was not available on runway 30, and the captain steered the airplane to the left after realizing that it would not be able to stop before the end of the runway surface. The airplane subsequently overran the runway and came to rest by the airport perimeter fence, causing substantial damage to the right wing. The flight crew did not recognize its runway alignment error until after landing.
Probable cause
The flight crew's misidentification of the landing runway, which resulted in a runway overrun and the airplane’s impact with the airport perimeter fence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA21LA011
- Event ID
- 20201029102210
- Case number
- DCA21LA011
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2020-10-22.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 7a9946adf8c53a83616c3e76c6b6e2737ec7a426cc63827f91dbd46826272690; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:18:53.734Z.