SEA06LA166 · Piper PA-24-250
Piper PA-24-250 · Accident: airframe, component or system failure during initial climb
From Astoria Regional Airport (AST) to Auburn Municipal Airport (S50)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA06LA166
- 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
- N6249P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Astoria Regional Airport (AST), Astoria, ORTo Auburn Municipal Airport (S50), Auburn, WA
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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, normal retraction/extension assembly › Overload
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After taking off and determining that the landing gear would not retract properly, and believing that the gear was in the down and locked position, the pilot elected to proceed to the destination airport. After touching down and rolling out on the main landing gear wheels, the nose landing gear was then lowered onto the runway's surface. After the nose landing gear contacted the runway all three landing gear retracted. A post-accident examination of the airplane revealed that the landing gear retraction motor had separated from its rear bulkhead attachment. The component's rivets were fractured in the contact surface plane, with deformation and smeared features observed to be consistent with overstress. It could not be determined when the overstress event occurred.
Probable cause
The failure of the landing gear's normal retraction/extension assembly due to an overload condition.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA06LA166
- Event ID
- 20060906X01304
- Case number
- SEA06LA166
- 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 2006-08-19.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 60d19dc9f8ab6c9d59cf7e411249a07e3da513c90490e6fa4c29690cc320fff5; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:32:58.692Z.