ERA15LA225 · Piper PA44 180
Pilot Training Center Piper PA44 180 · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Okeechobee County Airport (OBE) to Miami Executive Airport (TMB)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's departure or destination. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA15LA225
- 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 PA44 180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA44
- 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
- N2163F
- Operator
- Pilot Training Center
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route Narrative disagrees
- From Okeechobee County Airport (OBE), West Palm Beach, FLTo Miami Executive Airport (TMB), Miami, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 37 years (built 1978)
- 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
The flight instructor reported that the student pilot's approach and landing during the instructional flight were normal. During the landing roll, the nose landing gear (NLG) collapsed, which resulted in structural damage to the airframe.
Examination of the NLG revealed that an upper drag link and associated knee bolt were broken. Subsequent examination of the upper drag link revealed that it had failed due to overstress; however, the knee bolt had failed due to reverse-bending fatigue from relatively high-cyclic stresses. Given the failure location, it is likely that excessive wear in the bearing preceded the bolt failure.
The airplane manufacturer had issued a service bulletin applicable to the accident airplane, which recommended the inspection of the NLG drag link assembly and replacement of the associated knee bolt at 500-hour intervals. Further, the Federal Aviation Administration subsequently issued a special airworthiness bulletin, which recommended that the NLG drag link assembly inspection and knee bolt replacement interval be reduced to 400 hours time in service (TIS) for airplanes that experienced greater-than-normal landing cycles per flight hour, including airplanes used for flight school operations like the accident airplane. A review of the airplane's maintenance records revealed that the failed knee bolt was replaced about 386 hours TIS before the accident. Although the records indicated that the flight school followed the 500-hour interval not the 400-hour interval, the bolt had been replaced at less hours TIS than the recommended interval; therefore, the reason for the premature excessive wear could not be determined.
Probable cause
The failure of the nose landing gear upper drag link knee bolt due to reverse-bending fatigue, which was likely preceded by excessive bearing wear due to reasons that could not be determined based on the available evidence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA15LA225
- Event ID
- 20150529X11619
- Case number
- ERA15LA225
- 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: ad284567f179fe19bdbba7e8fbf86b6db981e164eb2afc699a9650cd0bc740a6; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:21:59.678Z.