ERA16LA042 · Cessna P210 N
Cessna P210 N · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Smoketown Airport (S37) to DeKalb Peachtree Airport (PDK)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA16LA042
- 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
Cessna P210 N
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- 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
- N731LT
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Smoketown Airport (S37), Smoketown, PATo DeKalb Peachtree Airport (PDK), Atlanta, GA
- Aircraft age
- About 36 years (built 1979)
- 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot reported that he was conducting an instrument flight rules cross-country flight and set up for an RNAV approach; however, he was subsequently cleared for an instrument landing system approach. He added that he continued to the airport, recalled lowering the landing gear, but because he was setting up for a different approach, he did not verify that the landing gear were down and locked. He added that the landing was normal but that, during the landing roll, he heard a "snap" and felt the airplane drop and veer left. The airplane departed the left side of the runway and came to rest with the nose landing gear (NLG) down and locked but with both main landing gear (MLG) collapsed.
Postaccident examination revealed no damage to either MLG downlock hook assembly. Testing of the landing gear system revealed that it functioned normally during multiple gear cycles, including an emergency extension. A check of the landing gear warning horn revealed that it was mis-set about 0.3 inch higher than specified, which reduced timely warning that the gear were not down and locked.
Given there was no damage to either MLG downlock hook assembly, it is likely that neither MLG were down and locked at touchdown because the pilot extended the landing gear late during the approach and did not verify that they were down and locked, which only allowed sufficient time for the NLG, which extends and locks first, to fully extend and lock before touchdown. If the landing gear warning horn had been properly set, it is likely the pilot would have been warned in time to either go around or to allow for complete gear extension before landing.
Probable cause
The pilot's delayed extension of the landing gear and his failure to ensure that the main landing gear (MLG) were down and locked before touchdown, which resulted in the collapse of both MLG. Contributing to the landing gear collapse was the mis-set landing gear warning horn, which prevented timely notification that the landing gear were not down and locked.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA16LA042
- Event ID
- 20151119X83701
- Case number
- ERA16LA042
- 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: 77e58abfdff22202d92065ae6e95c7385eca57d2518d96a3ccdc9ef0013409d8; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:58:45.891Z.