CEN10IA030 · Curtiss Wright P-40E
Minnesota Airways Curtiss Wright P-40E · Incident: landing gear collapse
From Granite Falls Municipal Airport / Lenzen-Roe Memorial Field (GDB) to Lincoln Airport (LNK)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN10IA030
- 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
- Incident
- 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
Curtiss Wright P-40E
- Aircraft type
- Curtiss Wright P-40
- 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
- N4420K
- Operator
- Minnesota Airways
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Granite Falls Municipal Airport / Lenzen-Roe Memorial Field (GDB), Granite Falls, MNTo Lincoln Airport (LNK), Lincoln, NE
- 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 · 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
- Minor
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Upon touchdown, the World War II era tailwheel-equipped airplane experienced an uncontrollable swerve as the right main landing gear began to collapse. As the right main gear exited the edge of the runway, the airplane rocked forward onto its nose and the propeller and left wing tip impacted the ground. The airplane rocked back and came to rest partially off the runway in an upright and right wing low position. An examination of the landing gear retraction system revealed that the landing gear handle detent was contaminated with paint. Subsequently, the landing gear handle did not stay in the detent which resulted in the right landing gear downlock pin to partially retract followed by the partial retraction of the right main landing gear.
Probable cause
The right landing gear's partial retraction during landing due to paint contamination of the landing gear handle detent.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN10IA030
- Event ID
- 20091027X41534
- Case number
- CEN10IA030
- 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, 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: 030fdda082372a2170e0e9b6f9b875216931d0b46eb6add1e3305e1e1ee7f383; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:26:36.203Z.