CHI94LA112 · Dassault-Breguet FALCON 900
Dassault-Breguet FALCON 900 · Accident: gear not extended during landing
From Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI94LA112
- 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
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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
Dassault-Breguet FALCON 900
- Aircraft type
- Dassault Breguet FALCON 900
- 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
- N327K
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA), Washington, DCTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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
- First occurrenceThe 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
- Gear not extended
- 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
- Landing gear, nose gear strut › Pressure too low
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After takeoff from Washington National Airport, the flight crew reported a loud air noise coming from the nose gear area after landing gear retraction. The crew elected to continue to their destination, Detroit Metro Airport. At their destination, the nose landing gear did not extend. The pilot made a landing with the nose gear UP. When the nose gear was retracted on takeoff the nose gear door hooks missed the gear door rollers on the lower nose gear strut. In the wheel well, the gear door rollers were above the gear door hooks. The gear will not extend when this configuration exists. The nose gear strut pressure was found to be below minimum acceptable pressure. The inspection program required a dimensional check of the nose strut extension to determine if there was acceptable strut pressure. It was found that the proper dimension can exist without minimum pressure in the strut.
Probable cause
the nose landing gear jammed in the UP position due to low pressure in the nose gear strut. A factor associated with the accident is the manufacturer's insufficient standards/requirements for determining the amount of nose strut inflation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI94LA112
- Event ID
- 20001206X00875
- Case number
- CHI94LA112
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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. 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: dbd398d32d7cc534791b65fa84304e8969fc9347b59c013c05fa4d6499f0fd00; retrieved 2026-09-23T01:15:08.758Z.