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ERA23LA216

2023-04-27 · Stratford, Connecticut, United States · None · 1 aircraft · Status: Completed

Airport BDR

Aircraft involved

Probable cause & findings

A failure of the left main landing gear down locking mechanism, which resulted in a collapse of that landing gear and a subsequent runway excursion.

Factual narrative

The pilot/owner was landing the experimental, amateur-built airplane at the conclusion of a night cross-country flight. The pilot described that he flared the airplane slightly high and that it, “skipped and then settled.” The landing roll seemed normal until the left main landing gear collapsed and the airplane departed the runway. The pilot further characterized that the touchdown wasn’t particularly hard, compared to landings he had previously made in other airplanes. The airplane’s horizontal stabilizer and elevator were substantially damaged during the runway excursion. Following the accident, the pilot had the airplane repaired by its original builder, which included replacing a section of threaded rod on the left main landing gear that had broken, which was part of the landing gear down-locking mechanism. Based on this information, it is likely that the failure of the threaded rod resulted in the landing gear collapse and subsequent runway excursion. Source: NTSB Aviation Accident Database Retrieved: 2026-02-12

NTSB Findings

FAA avdata. C = Cause, F = Factor.

  • — Aircraft-Aircraft systems-Landing gear system-Main landing gear-Failure

Verbatim from NTSB's published report. Source file NTSB_2023_ERA23LA216.txt. Findings + structured fields enriched from FAA avall.mdb. Full investigation docket on data.ntsb.gov ↗.

Search this event elsewhere

External sources are reported, not agency: signal that something happened, not fact about what happened.

Related research

Matched on aircraft type or causal vocabulary (runway excursion). All research papers