Aero Charter and Transport Cessna 402B accident
Cessna 402B · Accident: main gear collapsed during landing
From Roswell Air Center Airport (ROW) to Lea County Regional Airport (HOB)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN07LA156
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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 402B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 402
- 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
- N402BF
- Operator
- Aero Charter and Transport
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Roswell Air Center Airport (ROW), Roswell, NMTo Lea County Regional Airport (HOB), Hobbs, NM
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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 · landing roll
- 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
- Main 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, gear locking mechanism › Fractured
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that on approach he put the landing gear handle down and the left main landing gear down indicator light failed to illuminate. The pilot notified the air traffic control tower and executed a go-around. The pilot then raised the landing gear handle and lowered it again with the same result. During final approach the pilot reduced power on the engines to check the gear unsafe audible warning. The warning did not sound and the pilot elected to land the airplane with the unsafe gear indication. The pilot requested that tower controllers confirm that the landing gear was down. The controllers informed the pilot that the gear appeared to be down. On landing, the left main landing gear collapsed. The airplane departed the side of the runway and struck a taxiway sign, resulting in substantial damage.
Probable cause
The failure of the left main landing gear down lock due to overload causing the main landing gear to collapse.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN07LA156
- Event ID
- 20070911X01377
- Case number
- DEN07LA156
- 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. 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: 9191a4305ee6c5a7b16f460965ff41baa11341a9e1e42d9adde9308204352516; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:42:02.968Z.