ERA24LA051 · Lancair 235
Lancair 235 · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Herlong Airport (HEG) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA051
- 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
Lancair 235
- Aircraft type
- Lancair 235
- 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
- N235N
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Herlong Airport (HEG), Jacksonville, FLTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 11 years (built 2012)
- 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
- Landing gear collapse
- 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
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot attempted to extend the landing gear of the experimental amateur-built airplane, but did not receive a green light cockpit indication for the nose landing gear. He performed the emergency landing gear extension procedure and ultimately received a green light for the nose landing gear during an airport flyby, in which ground personnel observed that the nose landing gear was extended. The pilot subsequently performed a soft-field landing; however, the nose landing gear collapsed when it contacted the runway. The airplane veered left, struck a taxiway sign, and came to rest upright in a grassy area to the left of the runway.
Examination of the wreckage revealed extensive streaking of hydraulic fluid on the lower left section of the airplane and the empennage beginning at the area between the fuselage and left wing root and flap. The left main landing gear strut had separated during the accident and could have been one source of hydraulic fluid on the empennage. The landing gear hydraulic pump operated normally when tested and the landing gear downlock switches were found to be electrically operational as well. The hydraulic fluid reservoir was found to be low (approximately 25% filled), consistent with a hydraulic leak; however, due to impact damage, the source of the leak could not be determined, nor could the landing gear system be fully tested.
Probable cause
A landing gear collapse due to a hydraulic fluid leak in the landing gear system.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA051
- Event ID
- 20231129193450
- Case number
- ERA24LA051
- 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: a80d779e75ca3827c4c3239d80d431c047661d19e5d96bff54ba4d68aa50a645; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:19:51.266Z.