WPR12LA261 · Piper Aircraft Inc PA46R-350T
Piper Aircraft Inc PA46R-350T · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Palo Alto Airport (KPAO) to 061 · Cameron Park, CA
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR12LA261
- 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 Aircraft Inc PA46R-350T
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA46
- 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
- N488EA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Palo Alto Airport (KPAO), Palo Alto, CATo 061 · Cameron Park, CA
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the landing roll after a normal touchdown, the nose landing gear collapsed, and the airplane departed the side of the runway. The investigation determined that the gear collapse was the result of the fatigue failure of the right side nose gear actuator attach foot, which then separated from the engine mount. Records showed that the accident airplane had been flown more than 300 hours since its most recent compliance with the Piper Aircraft service bulletin (SB) 1103D, which calls for the inspection of this specific area for cracks every 100 hours. Although Piper Aircraft Company considers its service bulletins to be mandatory actions, the Federal Aviation Administration does not require that service bulletins be complied with for aircraft that are used exclusively for 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 operations, as this airplane was. Therefore, neither the owner of the airplane nor the maintenance personnel who performed annual inspections on the airplane were required to ensure compliance with SB 1103D. Failure to comply with SB 1103D could result in the nondetection of fatigue cracks that would eventually lead to the failure of a component of the engine mount/gear support assembly, as occurred in this accident.
Probable cause
The fatigue failure of the nose landing gear actuator attach foot during the landing roll. Contributing to the accident was the non-compliance with the manufacturer’s service bulletin.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR12LA261
- Event ID
- 20120614X20640
- Case number
- WPR12LA261
- 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 2012-06-05.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 7d20656076b6b8c5217c35da87219f9e150f7ea9eee5dd43274ce982715f06fd; retrieved 2026-09-15T18:30:07.712Z.