LAX00LA330 · Piper PA-28-161
ZP Aviation Piper PA-28-161 · Accident: main gear collapsed during landing
From Monterey Regional Airport (MRY) to Palo Alto Airport (PAO)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX00LA330
- 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
Piper PA-28-161
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N6462C
- Operator
- ZP Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Monterey Regional Airport (MRY), Monterey, CATo Palo Alto Airport (PAO)
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Main gear collapsed
- 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
- Other maintenance personnel › Maintenance, 100-hour inspection, inadequate
- Other maintenance personnel › Maintenance, inspection, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported he landed the rental aircraft 'somewhat hard' and collapsed the left main landing gear of the fixed gear airplane. The landing gear casting is bolted to the aft side of the wing spar with 8 bolts, 4 in a rectangular pattern on the top and 4 in a similar pattern on the bottom. During postaccident examination of the bottom 4 bolts it was determined that 2 were absent and not located in the wing, the bolt head was missing on the third bolt, and the fourth bolt was loose. All 4 of the upper attach bolts were loose. There was fretting at the casting-to-spar interface and the holes were elongated. The 8 bolts on the right main landing gear attachment, which did not fail, were all loose. There are no Airworthiness Directives or Service Bulletins in effect regarding the landing gear to wing spar attachment on this model aircraft. The aircraft manufacturer's Inspection Checklist for the 100-hour inspection instructs maintenance personnel to: 'Inspect gear struts, attachments, torque links and bolts for condition and security.'
Probable cause
The failure of maintenance personnel to detect and correct loose attachment fasteners and fretting at the landing gear attachment during maintenance inspections.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX00LA330
- Event ID
- 20001212X22006
- Case number
- LAX00LA330
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2000-09-04.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 04bbada860adc08b13019081b4a96b23704802a095fa4368074a1841ff9aeb58; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:29:13.316Z.