WPR13LA349 · Piper PA-44-180
Rocky Mountain College Piper PA-44-180 · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Billings Logan International Airport (BIL) to Billings Logan International Airport (BIL)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR13LA349
- 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
- N5367Y
- Operator
- Rocky Mountain College
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Billings Logan International Airport (BIL), Billings, MTTo Billings Logan International Airport (BIL), Billings, MT
- 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 oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and commercial pilot reported that they were conducting a training flight and that, after performing numerous maneuvers in the local practice area, they returned to the airport to perform practice landings in various simulated situations. After an uneventful takeoff and landing, they set up for a practice short-field landing. Following the landing flare, the airplane touched down on the runway surface, and the left main landing gear collapsed. The propellers contacted the runway, and the airplane skidded, which resulted in damage to the wing spar. Examinations revealed that the left main landing gear was fractured through the lower end of the strut tube, which was bent. The fracture surfaces of the strut tube and fork were consistent with an overstress event. Given the damage to the airplane, it is likely that the left main landing gear collapsed due to a hard landing and/or an excessive side load during the landing.
Probable cause
The pilots’ inadequate landing flare, which resulted in a hard landing and collapse of the left main landing gear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR13LA349
- Event ID
- 20130731X62626
- Case number
- WPR13LA349
- 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: b80f925a8acd83fa6f9b885053635cdf1ba2c4e13196f38ea6c0e0138c13133c; retrieved 2026-09-15T22:23:13.122Z.