WPR11LA471 · Piper PA-44-180
Bird Acquisition Piper PA-44-180 · Accident: hard landing
From Phoenix Deer Valley Airport (DVT) to Phoenix Deer Valley Airport (DVT)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR11LA471
- 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-44-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-44
- 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
- N316PA
- Operator
- Bird Acquisition
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Phoenix Deer Valley Airport (DVT), Phoenix, AZTo Phoenix Deer Valley Airport (DVT), Phoenix, AZ
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 oper/perf/capability
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot and certified flight instructor (CFI) were practicing a series of landings. The CFI said that the second and third landings were short field landings and were not excessively hard. During the landing roll on the third landing, the nose of the airplane lowered, and the CFI suspected a collapse of the oleo strut. The CFI took control of the airplane and taxied down the runway. The CFI stated that, during the taxi, he noted nothing irregular with the handling of the airplane and informed the tower air traffic controller that this was going to be a full stop landing. After contacting the ground controller, the CFI added power, and noticed that the steering had failed, so he attempted to use differential thrust to turn the airplane. He then heard the propellers contact the ground and immediately shut down both engines. After exiting the airplane, he noticed that the nose gear was extended forward and resting against the most forward fuselage rib in the wheel well. A postaccident examination revealed a fractured and separated drag link and hydraulic fluid leaking from the wheel well. Examination of the fractured surfaces revealed rough matte gray features consistent with an overstress fracture.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper flare and hard landing, which resulted in the failure of the nose landing gear drag link in overstress.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR11LA471
- Event ID
- 20110928X74502
- Case number
- WPR11LA471
- 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: 23b6f80929277dcf466b3d32bfeb2ba6903f9c09fe2581c23e82bc735e78e58e; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:47:30.080Z.