LAX05LA206 · Piper PA-24-250
Piper PA-24-250 · Accident: gear collapsed during landing
From Lake Havasu City Airport (HII) to Porterville Municipal Airport (PTV)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX05LA206
- 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-24-250
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-24
- 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
- N7737P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Havasu City Airport (HII), Lake Havasu, AZTo Porterville Municipal Airport (PTV), Porterville, CA
- 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
- 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, normal retraction/extension assembly › Inoperative
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The gear collapsed on landing. En route, the pilot encountered turbulence, and climbed to 10,500 feet. As he crossed the Sierra Nevada Mountains, he observed an overcast layer over the San Joaquin Valley. He did not have an instrument rating and decided to divert back across the mountains to the airport where the accident occurred. During the descent, he encountered very heavy turbulence. On downwind, he selected the landing gear down, but it failed to extend, giving neither an up-or-down indication on the position lights. He observed the landing gear circuit breaker had popped out, and attempted to reset it, but it would immediately pop back out. He then activated the emergency gear extension system. In his report of the accident he stated, "I pulled on the handle and felt it was locked." On approach, the pilot experienced strong crosswinds and turbulence, and just after touchdown, the landing the gear collapsed. The airplane skidded approximately 200 feet along the runway. The reason for the failure of the landing gear system to extend normally was not determined.
Probable cause
The failure of the normal landing gear system to extend for undetermined reasons that resulted in a gear collapse during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX05LA206
- Event ID
- 20050705X00929
- Case number
- LAX05LA206
- 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: 5f255dd718514d4aa8ff467a4bebc69778d360fc7ef6059f09d0c49699411078; retrieved 2026-09-22T06:06:11.519Z.