CEN14LA107 · Piper PA 24-250
Piper PA 24-250 · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Deming Municipal Airport (DMN) to Deming Municipal Airport (DMN)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN14LA107
- 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 24-250
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-24
- 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
- N6767P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Deming Municipal Airport (DMN), Deming, NMTo Deming Municipal Airport (DMN), Deming, NM
- Aircraft age
- About 54 years (built 1960)
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that he lowered the landing gear and observed gear-down indications before touchdown; however, the landing gear collapsed during the landing. A postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that all three landing gear had collapsed; no anomalies in the extension/retraction linkage were found.
The airplane owner reported that, during recovery of the airplane, he had adjusted the nose landing gear actuating rod for the nose gear to fully seat on the stop flats. Additionally, the landing gear had been serviced during the most recent annual inspection, which was about 24 flight hours before the accident. Although it is possible that the landing gear was not properly adjusted after the maintenance work, several flights had been conducted in the interim without any reported issues related to the landing gear system.
Postaccident examinations revealed that the nose landing gear down lock switch was improperly mounted upside down and that the limit switch was stuck in the closed position. The inoperative nose landing gear switch would have provided a gear down/locked indication to the pilot regardless of the nose landing gear condition. It is possible that the nose landing gear did not fully extend and lock down before landing due to either the inoperative limit switch or a slight misrigging of the system. However, because the landing gear was operated by the transmission jackscrew, it is unlikely that an issue with the nose landing gear would have caused a collapse of the main landing gear if the main landing gear was fully extended and locked in the down position. The reason for the landing gear collapse could not be determined.
Probable cause
The collapse of the landing gear during landing for reasons that could not be determined during postaccident examinations.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN14LA107
- Event ID
- 20140109X24142
- Case number
- CEN14LA107
- 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: 988b5075872b09cccff9971ffdea5bf9adb0ad07284c68fc7272aae2bebb7f21; retrieved 2026-09-15T23:14:38.594Z.