ERA11LA264 · Piper PA-28-161
Piper PA-28-161 · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Danielson Airport (LZD) to Meriden Markham Municipal Airport (MMK)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's departure or destination. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA11LA264
- 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-28-161
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N2838D
- Operator
- Persaud Munidat
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route Narrative disagrees
- From Danielson Airport (LZD), Danielson, CTTo Meriden Markham Municipal Airport (MMK), Merident, CT
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot entered the left downwind leg of the traffic pattern at the airport. While on the final leg of the traffic pattern, the airplane encountered vertical wind shear and landed hard on the runway. After the impact, the right main landing gear of the airplane collapsed, and the pilot taxied off the right side of the runway, coming to rest perpendicular to the runway. The most recent annual inspection was performed 3 months before the accident, and at that time the airplane had accumulated 13,962.8 hours of total time in service. The airplane was involved in another accident 2 months earlier that involved a hard landing. Thirteen days before the accident, the most recent maintenance was completed on the airplane that involved an inspection of the main landing gear. The airplane was found to be in airworthy condition, was signed off on that date, and at that time had 14,055.3 hours of total time in service. Examination of the inboard torque link lug of the right main landing gear revealed that it failed as a result of progressive fatigue cracking. The lugs are the subject of a Piper service bulletin recommending repetitive 100-hour recurrent inspections for cracking in the lugs. Although the complete loading history of the gear is unknown, it is likely that detectable indications of metal fatigue would have been present for more than 100 flight hours. There was no documentation in the airplane’s maintenance records that indicated that the factory service bulletin had been performed.
Probable cause
Maintenance personnel's inadequate inspection of the main landing gear, which resulted in a failure of the right main landing gear’s inboard torque link lug due to a fatigue fracture. Contributing to the accident was owner's lack of compliance with a factory service bulletin addressing landing gear inspections.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA11LA264
- Event ID
- 20110425X11248
- Case number
- ERA11LA264
- 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: 125b400886810b4d70a56bd645fa047a862de2f7e208825941446034df103b78; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:05:42.117Z.