CEN10CA116 · Piper PA-31T
Missouri Forge Piper PA-31T · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Doniphan Municipal Airport (X33) to Columbia Regional Airport (COU)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN10CA116
- 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-31T
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-31
- 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
- N723JP
- Operator
- Missouri Forge
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Doniphan Municipal Airport (X33), Doniphan, MOTo Columbia Regional Airport (COU), Columbia, MO
- 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 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that the accident occurred during landing at the destination airport under visual weather conditions and light winds. He stated that upon landing, the left main landing gear collapsed and the left wing contacted the runway. The airplane subsequently departed the runway pavement and came to rest about mid-field in the grass adjacent to the runway. It had rotated about 180 degrees and was oriented on an approximately reciprocal heading. The right main landing gear also collapsed during the accident sequence. The pilot stated that verifying the landing gear indications was normally part of his before-landing procedure; however, he could not specifically recall observing three green indications prior to the accident. A postaccident examination revealed substantial damage to the lower fuselage in the vicinity of the cabin entry door. In addition, the inboard landing gear doors exhibited crushing damage consistent with the landing gear being in transit at the time of contact with the runway. The inboard landing gear doors open when the gear is in transit and close after the gear extension sequence is complete. Recorded winds at the time of the accident were 8 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to verify that the landing gear was fully extended prior to landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN10CA116
- Event ID
- 20100209X10033
- Case number
- CEN10CA116
- 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: e65af22940f452907df8c91c5d9f3edb302daed0aa10b818ac9beb0b1a6f1fb1; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:40:12.096Z.