Flight Express Flight 805
Cessna 210L · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Columbia Metropolitan Airport (CAE) to Tampa International Airport (TPA)
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA08LA066
- 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 210L
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- 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
- N5489V
- Operator
- Flight Express
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Columbia Metropolitan Airport (CAE), Columbia, SCTo Tampa International Airport (TPA), Tampa, FL
- 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
- Defining eventThe 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
- Landing gear collapse
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While inbound to land, the pilot lowered the landing gear using the normal system and the nose and left main landing gears went into the down and locked position; however, the right main landing gear did not due to a false down-and-locked indication caused by a malfunction of the right main landing gear down-and-locked switch. As such, the pilot observed a green light indicating that all landing gears were down and locked and continued the approach. During the landing roll the right main landing gear collapsed. Postaccident examination revealed that the malfunction of the right down-and-locked switch was caused by a bent plunger, which shut off the electrically-driven hydraulic pump before the right gear went into the down and locked position. Since 1992, the right main landing gear down-and-locked switch had been replaced six times, with the latest replacement occurring in October 2004. The airplane had been operated for 2,082 hours since the latest switch replacement. Additionally, the operator performs gear rigging testing every 300 hours. The latest rigging check occurred on November 15, 2007. The airplane had accumulated approximately 218 hours since then at the time of the accident.
Probable cause
The malfunction of the right main landing gear down-and-locked switch.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA08LA066
- Event ID
- 20080304X00257
- Case number
- MIA08LA066
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: 3912917f396a5181ab3f0eaf988dd4d7e883def63a4e05bdc5a5ba8e26e31ca6; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:24:03.045Z.