FTW02LA165 · Piper PA-46-350P
Piper PA-46-350P · Accident: nose gear collapsed during landing
From William P. Hobby Airport (HOU) to Palestine Municipal Airport (PSN)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW02LA165
- 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
- Unknown
- 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-46-350P
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-46
- 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
- N529TX
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From William P. Hobby Airport (HOU), Houston, TXTo Palestine Municipal Airport (PSN), Palestiine, TX
- 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 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
- Landing gear, nose gear attach point › Failure, total
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the landing roll when the nose wheel made contact with the runway, the pilot felt a "hard bump followed by a violent jerking motion to the left." The airplane departed the runway before coming to rest. Removal of the engine cowling and examination of the engine mount revealed that the right side of the nose gear actuator aft attach point had separated from the tube cluster on the mount assembly. The actuator was found pushed aft into the firewall, and a section of the firewall, located aft of the nose landing gear actuator, was crushed upward and aft into the forward baggage compartment. According to the manufacturer's representative engineer, the structural integrity at the base of the engine mount was compromised and would require major repair." Photographs and stereoscopic magnification of the separated surface of the nose gear actuator aft attach point showed signatures consistent with overload. Service Bulletin (SB) No. 1103 was issued by the manufacturer for inspection and/or replacement of the engine mount. The SB had not been performed on the accident airplane; however, the owner/pilot reported that it was scheduled to be performed at the next scheduled maintenance visit.
Probable cause
The failure of the nose gear actuator aft attach point from the tube cluster on the engine mount assembly. A contributing factor was the owner's non-compliance with the service bulletin for inspection/replacement of the engine mount.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW02LA165
- Event ID
- 20020530X00774
- Case number
- FTW02LA165
- 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, coordinates. 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: 4ac2445ba1db0f388a696054b3b301bb1fe0420178db35e412da359cbfb7a929; retrieved 2026-09-22T10:55:45.938Z.