CHI06LA080 · Cessna 421C
Cessna 421C · Accident: airframe, component or system failure on approach
From U42 · Salt Lake City, UT to Cincinnati Municipal Airport Lunken Field (LUK)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI06LA080
- 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 421C
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 421
- 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
- N98507
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From U42 · Salt Lake City, UTTo Cincinnati Municipal Airport Lunken Field (LUK), Cincinnati, OH
- 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
- Approach
- 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
- Airframe, component or system failure
- 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, main gear › Malfunction
- Landing gear, main gear › 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 twin-engine airplane sustained substantial damage during landing when the main landing gear would not extend. During the approach to landing, only the nose landing gear extended and the main landing gear remained in the wing wheel wells. The pilot reported that when he attempted to lower the landing gear prior to landing, the main landing gear indicator lights remained unlit. He cycled the landing gear handle three times without effect. He yawed and porpoised the airplane to get the gear down, but with no result. He executed the emergency gear extension procedures and actuated the nitrogen bottle without success. He did a fly-by of the control tower, and the controllers confirmed that the main gear were still in the wheel wells. He tried to get the gear down by pulling positive G's on the airplane, but it did not work. The pilot decided to land with the nose gear down and the main gear up. On short final at 100 feet above ground level, he put the mixtures to idle cutoff. At 50 feet he raised the flaps. The airplane skidded on the runway for 1,500 to 2,000 feet, and then the nose landing gear collapsed. The airplane was lifted up during recovery and the main landing gear fell into the down and locked position. The inspection of the main landing gear did not reveal any anomalies.
Probable cause
The main landing gear malfunctioned and failed to extend during the landing approach for an undetermined reason, which resulted in a main gear up landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI06LA080
- Event ID
- 20060228X00250
- Case number
- CHI06LA080
- 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: 7cc40643dc3bc91b8eed04b9833534b7c843b845232b187aef885af41258d23b; retrieved 2026-09-22T05:06:11.508Z.