WPR09CA294 · Dornier Gmbh ALPHA-JET
Dornier Gmbh ALPHA-JET · Accident: landing gear not configured
From King County International Airport - Boeing Field (KBFI) to Arlington Municipal Airport (KAWO)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR09CA294
- 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
Dornier Gmbh ALPHA-JET
- Aircraft type
- Dornier ALPHA-JET
- 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
- N707XA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From King County International Airport - Boeing Field (KBFI), Seattle, WATo Arlington Municipal Airport (KAWO), Arlington, 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
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- 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 not configured
- 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
As he was preparing to land, the contract pilot, who was positioning the airplane at the destination airport for minor maintenance, inadvertently set one number incorrectly when he initially set in the common traffic advisory frequency. After transmitting his position/intent four times, and hearing no other aircraft on the radio (including one that he saw on the runway), he realized that his frequency was not set correctly. He therefore set in the correct frequency. About the time he was resetting the frequency, he lowered the flaps to full, but inadvertently forgot to lower the landing gear. As he continued on around the pattern, he became "preoccupied" with the aircraft that was on the runway, and did not notice that the gear was not extended. He subsequently landed with the gear retracted, resulting in substantial damage to the belly stringers and bulkheads. The pilot reported that there were no anomalies associated with any of the airplane's systems.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to lower the landing gear prior to landing. Contributing to the accident were the distractions created by the pilot incorrectly setting a radio frequency and by his fixation on an airplane that was on the runway during his approach.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR09CA294
- Event ID
- 20090618X45204
- Case number
- WPR09CA294
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2009-06-17.
- API snapshot SHA-256: ab492049e301a21dbce6ac35ecb0890a3b976c7fd1e4867689cba172c852bb2e; retrieved 2026-09-15T11:29:30.713Z.