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Atlas / NTSB / ERA20LA342

NTSB CAROL · Event

Event ERA20LA342

2020-09-30 DeFuniak Springs, Florida, United States Airport · 54J None 1 aircraft Status: Completed

Aircraft involved

Probable cause & findings

The failure of the left landing gear airframe cross tube during landing, due to corrosion hidden under riveted fairing.

Factual narrative

The pilot was performing a touch-and-go landing. After an uneventful touchdown and rollout, and just prior to his application of power to takeoff, the airplane swerved “pretty severely to the right” despite his counter controls. The airplane then veered off the right side of the runway, into the grass and the left main landing gear collapsed under the fuselage, which resulted in substantial damage to the left wing and fuselage. Postaccident examination of the airplane by a Federal Aviation Administration Inspector found that the left main landing gear airframe cross tube had fractured, and a significant amount of corrosion and rust was visible. However, this corrosion was not visible until a section of riveted fairing was removed. Given this information, it is likely that the corroded left main landing gear cross tube failed during the landing, which resulted in a loss of directional control during the takeoff attempt, and a subsequent runway excursion. Source: NTSB Aviation Accident Database Retrieved: 2026-02-12

NTSB Findings

Hierarchical cause / factor breakdown from the FAA bulk avdata database. Each finding tagged C (Cause) or F (Factor).

  • Aircraft-Aircraft systems-Landing gear system-Main landing gear-Fatigue/wear/corrosion

Verbatim from NTSB's published report. Source file NTSB_2020_ERA20LA342.txt. Findings + structured fields enriched from FAA avall.mdb. Full investigation docket on data.ntsb.gov ↗.

Related research

What the literature says.

Academic papers and agency reports matching this event's aircraft type or causal vocabulary (runway excursion). Sourced from NASA NTRS, NTSB Safety Studies, FAA CAMI, AOPA Air Safety Institute, Embry-Riddle Scholarly Commons, arXiv, and the Semantic Scholar academic graph.

Browse the full corpus — academia portal ↗