ERA14LA107 · Piper PA-34-200
Piper PA-34-200 · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Leonard M. Thompson International Airport (MYAM) to PBI · West Palm Beach, FL
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA14LA107
- 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-34-200
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-34
- 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
- N16389
- Operator
- Richard Roberts
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Leonard M. Thompson International Airport (MYAM), Marsh HarbourTo PBI · West Palm Beach, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 41 years (built 1973)
- 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 handling/service
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot/owner reported that, during the approach, he noted that the nose landing gear (NLG) indication light was not illuminated. He aborted the landing and chose to fly by the air traffic control tower to have a controller check the position of the landing gear. An air traffic controller reported that the landing gear appeared to be down. The airplane was then cleared to land, and, during the landing roll, the NLG collapsed, and the airplane came to rest on the runway.
Postaccident examination revealed that there was a hydraulic leak above the NLG actuator and that the NLG drag links were not secured in accordance with the manufacturer's maintenance manual. Over 9 years before the accident, the manufacturer issued a mandatory service bulletin (SB) that required inspections of the NLG, including inspection of the NLG actuator mounting bracket for cracks, elongation of the holes where the retraction link attaches, and loose mounting rivets, and the lubrication of the NLG assembly at a frequency interval not to exceed 50 hours. Subsequently, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an airworthiness directive (AD) requiring the actions contained in the SB.
The postaccident examination also revealed that a microswitch appeared to have recently been replaced; however, no associated maintenance entry was found during a review of the airplane's maintenance logbooks. The review did reveal that the airplane's most recent annual inspection was performed about 2 years and 300 flight hours before the accident, that the AD was complied with at that time, and that no defects were noted. No other entries regarding annual inspections or compliance with the SB or AD were noted. Therefore, it is likely that the airplane was not in compliance with the SB or AD at the time of the accident, which likely resulted in the NLG being unable to operate properly and in its collapsing on landing. If the airplane owner had maintained the airplane in accordance with the SB and AD, the hydraulic leak and the improperly secured NLG drag links could have been detected and corrected, which could have prevented the NLG collapse.
Probable cause
The pilot/owner’s failure to maintain the airplane in accordance with a mandatory service bulletin and an airworthiness directive, which resulted in the nose landing gear collapse during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA14LA107
- Event ID
- 20140129X53458
- Case number
- ERA14LA107
- 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: b93ef76d60bef6e6a5b6dcbb9458e6e6489576194420900856f06cedb2b6dbc9; retrieved 2026-09-15T23:17:26.164Z.