CEN15LA444 · Piper PA 24-250
Piper PA 24-250 · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Conway Regional Airport (CXW) to Lakefront Airport (NEW)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN15LA444
- 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
- N7803P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Conway Regional Airport (CXW), Conway, ARTo Lakefront Airport (NEW), New Orleans, LA
- Aircraft age
- About 53 years (built 1962)
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot was landing the airplane after conducting a cross-country flight. The pilot reported that, after the main landing gear touched down, he heard a "throbbing" sound and thought that the right main landing gear tire had gone flat. The pilot applied left aileron in an attempt to lift the load off the right main tire. The airplane subsequently drifted left, the landing gear collapsed, and the airplane then came to rest upright adjacent to the runway.
The pilot reported no anomalies with the landing gear system before landing. The airplane was examined about 1 month after the accident occurred. During the examination, the airplane was resting on a flatbed trailer, and the landing gear system and tires were not accessible; therefore, the reason for the landing gear collapse could not be determined.
Probable cause
The collapse of the landing gear for reasons that could not be determined based on the available information.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN15LA444
- Event ID
- 20151020X54527
- Case number
- CEN15LA444
- 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: 47e7235ff1970858c9ffc9b3251cfb485a2ffcdfd74f61bb433c74bd7ad94306; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:54:23.017Z.