WPR13LA237 · Piper PA-32R-301T
Piper PA-32R-301T · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Brown Field Municipal Airport (SDM) to Mesa Gateway Airport (IWA)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR13LA237
- 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-32R-301T
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N8197W
- Operator
- Huish Dale A
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Brown Field Municipal Airport (SDM), San Diego, CATo Mesa Gateway Airport (IWA), Mesa, 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
- 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
The pilot reported that, about 1 hour 10 minutes into the flight, the airplane began experiencing alternator and battery problems. The radios were inoperative because there was no electrical power, so he diverted from an airport with an air traffic control tower to an airport without one. He selected the landing gear lever to extend the gear normally. He also operated the emergency landing gear extension system. During the landing roll, the nose landing gear (NLG) collapsed, the airplane departed the runway, and the right wing leading edge and aileron sustained substantial damage.
During a postaccident examination of the airplane, a check of the alternator found no field and no output voltage. The battery was charged to 12 volts, and it subsequently discharged to 10 volts with no load over 1 hour. The airplane was equipped with a retractable tricycle landing gear, which was hydraulically operated by an electrically powered reversible pump; the loss of electrical power prevented the hydraulic pump from actuating, which prevented the landing gear from extending normally. However, operation of the emergency extension system allowed the landing gear to free-fall, and two springs were provided to assist the NLG to the down position. During postaccident testing with battery power, the landing gear operated normally during both normal operation and emergency extension; the failure of the NLG to lock could not be duplicated.
The landing gear positions were indicated by three green lights located above the selector lever for the gear down-and-locked position. However, these lights would not have been operable due to the total electrical failure, and, therefore, the pilot had no means to verify that all three landing gear were not down and locked before touchdown.
Probable cause
The failure of the alternator and/or battery, which prevented the operation of the landing gear extension system and resulted in the nose landing gear collapsing during the landing roll.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR13LA237
- Event ID
- 20130520X11307
- Case number
- WPR13LA237
- 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: 09042f727f607b8b51dfde9a2309952607789354972dee16d85a8f1986b61feb; retrieved 2026-09-15T21:36:30.442Z.