O'Hare Flying Service Piper PA-31T accident
Piper PA-31T · Accident: wheels up landing
From Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport (AMA) to Austin Bergstrom International Airport (AUS)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW97LA253
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
Piper PA-31T
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-31
- 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
- N974DC
- Operator
- O'Hare Flying Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport (AMA), Amarillo, TXTo Austin Bergstrom International Airport (AUS)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Wheels up landing
- 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
- Pilot in command › Gear extension, not performed
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Austin, TX, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
After an uneventful 1.5 hour on-demand air taxi flight, the pilot made a wheels up landing. He reported that during the flare, he realized that the gear was not extended. He attempted to execute a 'go-around', but was too late as the right propeller contacted the runway surface. Subsequently, the left propeller contacted the runway, and the aircraft 'skipped down the runway', went through grass, and impacted a hangar.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to extend the landing gear. A factor relating to the accident was: the pilot's failure to follow the landing checklist.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW97LA253
- Event ID
- 20001208X08370
- Case number
- FTW97LA253
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- 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: 73bfd40cba4f34316fae48dff7199e4003db314525e17487a631233dd1740974; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:29:59.119Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N974DC; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.