ANC06LA093 · Piper PA-31
Everts Air Alaska Piper PA-31 · Accident: wheels up landing
From Fairbanks International Airport (PAFA) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC06LA093
- 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-31
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-31
- 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
- N41185
- Operator
- Everts Air Alaska
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fairbanks International Airport (PAFA), Fairbanks, AKTo not recorded
- 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 certificated pilot was conducting a maintenance test flight related to the airplane's navigation instrumentation under Title 14, CFR Part 91. In a written statement the pilot reported that when he returned from the maintenance flight the tower asked him to expedite the landing due to traffic. He said he put the flaps and gear down, and checked the nose gear in a mirror on the left engine. He indicated that in the mirror, the nose gear appeared to be "extending in a normal manner." He reported that upon touchdown all 3 landing gear collapsed. The director of operations said the airplane was taken to a maintenance facility where landing gear extension and retraction tests were performed, and no anomalies were noted. Photographs provided by the operator showed no damage to the left or right main landing gear tires, wheels, or landing gear leg doors. The photographs do show abrasions and scratches parallel to the fuselage's longitudinal axis on the exterior of both the left and right main landing gear wheel doors, consistent with ground contact in the closed (gear retracted) position. An additional photograph showed abrasions and scratches on the exterior of both nose wheel doors parallel to the longitudinal axis of the fuselage. In a written statement the operator suggested that the gear unsafe horn should be wired through the audio panel, so as to be more easily heard by pilots wearing noise attenuating headsets. The airplane received structural damage to the bottom of the fuselage, stringers, and bulkheads.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadvertent landing with the landing gear retracted, which resulted in structural damage to the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC06LA093
- Event ID
- 20060814X01168
- Case number
- ANC06LA093
- 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: 718d83fbb2c286b2e65bf68fa29c89afee205fb15dda6015961be8b6c19bda73; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:41:31.666Z.