ERA23LA081 · Learjet 35 A
Reva Learjet 35 A · Accident: dragged wing/rotor/float/other during landing
From Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport (FXE) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA23LA081
- 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
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
- N979RF
- Operator
- Reva
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport (FXE), Fort Lauderdale, FLTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 41 years (built 1981)
- 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
- Dragged wing/rotor/float/other
- 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight crew reported that during a civilian positioning flight to pick up a medical patient, they were cleared to land via a visual approach at night. During the base segment in the traffic pattern, the first officer, who was the pilot flying, lost sight of the runway and transferred the flight controls to the captain at an altitude of about 900 ft mean sea level. The first officer stated that after the exchange of the flight controls, the “aircraft was on short final and passed over the threshold at an angle.” Subsequently, during the captain’s landing flare and touchdown, the stick shaker activated, and the left wing dropped and impacted the runway. The captain completed the landing roll, stopped the airplane on the runway, and all of the occupants exited without incident. The impact with the runway resulted in substantial damage to the left wing. The flight crew did not report any preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The flight crew’s continuation of an unstable approach which resulted in abnormal runway contact during the landing flare and touchdown.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA23LA081
- Event ID
- 20221209106436
- Case number
- ERA23LA081
- 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, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2022-12-02.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 0b99e52430169bb798e615f78d94cfaae4b675a2643ccadcfec34c64723ba1fa; retrieved 2026-09-16T16:32:51.237Z.