ATL98LA093 · Lane Progressive Aerodyne, Inc SEAREY
Lane Progressive Aerodyne, Inc SEAREY · Accident: nose over during landing
From No airport to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL98LA093
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Lane Progressive Aerodyne, Inc SEAREY
- Aircraft type
- Lane Progressive Aerodyne SEAREY
- 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
- N26RL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From No airportTo 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 · landing roll
- 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
- Nose over
- 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
- Gear extension › Inadvertent activation
- Landing gear, gear switch › Activated
- Owner/builder › Acft/equip, inadequate design
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot stated he completed the landing checklist which included checking for a gear up light and visually ensuring the gear was up. According to the pilot, after touchdown, the seaplane violently dove under the water. According to a witness, the seaplane touched down, skipped on the water, and then nose dived under water. The witness also stated that during the landing, the gear was up. During the rescue, he stated the gear was down. The FAA inspector stated he found the right main landing gear was in a position halfway between up and down, and rotated rearward. The left main gear was in a down and locked position. Examination of the landing gear extension/retraction system did not reveal any abnormalities. The pilot stated that the landing gear switch was designed so a closed guard, where the guard points down, indicated down and locked gear. In order to put the gear down, one could simply touch the guard because it is spring loaded to a down position. The pilot believed that the bouncing on landing could have caused the guard to close.
Probable cause
The inadequate design of the landing gear switch by the builder which allowed an inadvertent activation of the landing gear switch, leading to a gear extension during a water landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL98LA093
- Event ID
- 20001211X10471
- Case number
- ATL98LA093
- 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: 826c42748f682d6286965bd3afb2342c0fd7ad70bbf2f4ead05a61c62523da87; retrieved 2026-09-21T11:25:44.412Z.