ANC05LA130 · Cessna 441
Cessna 441 · Accident: wheels up landing
From CVD · Cordova, AK to Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (ANC)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC05LA130
- 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
Cessna 441
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 441
- 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
- N77SA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From CVD · Cordova, AKTo Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (ANC), Anchorage, AK
- 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 › 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 airline transport pilot was landing a retractable landing gear-equipped turboprop airplane on a 10,900 foot long, by 150 foot wide paved runway. According to the pilot, while on approach to land, he selected 10 degrees of wing flaps, and then selected the landing gear selector switch to the down position, which was followed by "three greens", indicating the landing gear was down, locked, and safe for landing. He said that after touchdown, during the initial landing roll, the landing gear retracted, and the airplane slid on the underside of the fuselage. The airplane veered to the right of the runway centerline, and the right wing collided with numerous runway edge lights. A postcrash fire ensued when the right wing's fuel tank was breached. The airplane received structural damage to the underside of the fuselage, and the right wing was destroyed. Propeller strike marks originated in the vicinity of the accident airplane's touchdown point, and extended to the airplane's final resting point, about 2,200 feet from initial contact. A postaccident inspection of the airplane by the IIC and another NTSB air safety investigator, disclosed no evidence of any preaccident mechanical malfunction of the landing gear assembly or its associated operating systems. The airplane was placed on jack stands and hydraulic pressure was supplied to the airplane's hydraulic system using a hydraulic ground power unit. The airplane's landing gear retraction system was cycled numerous times, with no mechanical anomalies noted.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to lower the airplane's landing gear during landing, which resulted in an inadvertent wheels up landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC05LA130
- Event ID
- 20050902X01379
- Case number
- ANC05LA130
- 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 2005-08-29.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 46ad9dd4be691b92e6d04a2ef020221b5314b016fd74a759e4b40dc849d7c6cf; retrieved 2026-09-22T05:26:01.402Z.