WPR22LA357 · Vashon Aircraft RANGER R7
Vashon Aircraft RANGER R7 · Accident: system/component malfunction/failure (non-power) during takeoff
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR22LA357
- 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
- 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
Vashon Aircraft RANGER R7
- Aircraft type
- Vashon RANGER R7
- 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
- N151VR
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 3 years (built 2019)
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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 systems
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, when the airplane reached 15-20 knots (kts) during the initial takeoff roll, the left main landing gear collapsed, and the airplane ground looped to the left. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the left elevator and left wing. Examination of the left main landing gear (MLG) leg determined it fractured due to preexisting cracks that initiated at the inboard side of the leg at the forward and aft sides of the forward hole for attaching the leg to the fuselage at the outboard attachment bracket. Examination of the crack revealed it existed before the accident flight; however, spacing between crack arrest features suggest the number of load cycles from initiation to failure was relatively low. A review of available flight data did not reveal a specific hard landing event that could have resulted in the initiation of the crack. The airplane’s main landing gear is made from a woven E-glass with epoxy resin and prepreg laminate that is pressed and then oven cured. The raw material is not aviation specific. Destructive testing of the failed landing gear and material samples from other gear manufactured from the same lot of material found the material did not meet minimum specified strength requirements. The material batch in question was traceable to 16 airplanes (30 gear legs), including 1 other airplane that had a similar failure following a hard landing. The owners of the affected airplanes were notified and the landing gear for some of the affected airplanes were replaced. Following this accident, the airplane manufacturer initiated a redesign of the landing gear and began performing destructive batch sample tests of the composite material used for every batch of gear legs to ensure each new gear leg meets minimum required strength requirements. The accident is consistent with the landing gear being manufactured using material that did not meet the necessary strength requirements and subsequently failing after a crack developed in the landing gear. The event that initiated the crack was not identified based on available evidence.
Probable cause
Failure of the landing gear due to material deficiencies that reduced the strength of the landing gear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR22LA357
- Event ID
- 20220928106009
- Case number
- WPR22LA357
- 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, cause areas. 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: a6668bfacd93b339276d0d9f0768e318701d651cba02ee9a9837caf787865f6c; retrieved 2026-09-16T16:07:12.070Z.