NYC05LA056 · Piper PA-30
Piper PA-30 · Accident: wheels up landing
From Cape May County Airport (WWD) to Millville Municipal Airport (MIV)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC05LA056
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-30
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-30
- 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
- N7547Y
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cape May County Airport (WWD), Wildwood, NJTo Millville Municipal Airport (MIV), Millville, NJ
- 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
- 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(cfi) › Wheels up landing, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot performed an ILS approach to runway 10, and "broke out of the clouds" at 600-700 feet, approximately 1,000 feet down the length of the runway. At that time, the flight instructor said, "let's get out of here," and the private pilot retracted the landing gear and added power for the missed approach. The flight instructor then took the controls and said "he had the airplane," initiating a tight, right hand pattern for runway 28. As the airplane touched down, the flight instructor noted that the landing gear was still retracted. The airplane then landed on its belly, struck both propellers, and skid several hundred feet before coming to rest at the intersection of runway 14-32. After the accident, the landing gear was cycled up and down several times, and no mechanical anomalies were noted.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's failure to lower the landing gear during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC05LA056
- Event ID
- 20050323X00355
- Case number
- NYC05LA056
- 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: 1df987fcccf9c3511cd5dae75be0eac9085bcc898c5bbda6c900d44d36a6432d; retrieved 2026-09-22T06:22:16.522Z.