DEN03LA065 · Piper PA-32RT-300T
Piper PA-32RT-300T · Accident: hard landing
From Long Beach International Airport (LGB) to St George Regional Airport (SGU)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN03LA065
- 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-32RT-300T
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N31998
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Long Beach International Airport (LGB), Long Beach, CATo St George Regional Airport (SGU), St. George, UT
- 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
- Hard 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
- Landing gear, gear locking mechanism › Failure, total
- Pilot in command › Flare, improper
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot made a normal straight-in approach and "crossed the fence at about 80 to 90 knots." Just before touchdown, the airplane "ballooned" and touched down "a little harder than normal." The nose gear collapsed and the airplane skidded to a halt about 1,300 feet down the runway. The nose landing gear down-lock and an exemplar down-lock were sent to NTSB's materials laboratory for examination. The examination showed the down-lock "contained a fracture that intersected the hook portion." Microscopic examination revealed "a river pattern that pointed to the inner bend area of the hook, indicating that this was the origin of the fracture. The fracture face contained features typical of overstress separation, with no evidence of a preexisting (fatigue) crack. The origin area of the fracture contained no evidence of mechanical or corrosion damage. However, contact wear was noted in the throat of the hook."
Probable cause
the pilot's improper flare technique, resulting in a hard landing that caused the nose landing gear down-lock to fail and the gear to collapse. A contributing factor was the unfavorable wind.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN03LA065
- Event ID
- 20030428X00587
- Case number
- DEN03LA065
- 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, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2003-04-16.
- API snapshot SHA-256: ccca1b57891c5d16a87c12a4d2ab9b062d801724c7eef5d1016025afb3dab740; retrieved 2026-09-22T09:23:57.777Z.