CEN16LA157 · Czech Sport Aircraft AS PIPER SPORT
Czech Sport Aircraft AS PIPER SPORT · Accident: part(s) separation from aircraft during landing
From Columbia Airport (4G8) to Mansfield Lahm Regional Airport (MFD)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16LA157
- 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
Czech Sport Aircraft AS PIPER SPORT
- Aircraft type
- Czech Sport PIPER SPORT
- 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
- N197PS
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Columbia Airport (4G8), Columbia Statio, OHTo Mansfield Lahm Regional Airport (MFD), Mansfield, OH
- Aircraft age
- About 6 years (built 2010)
- 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
- Part(s) separation from aircraft
- 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
- 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 airline transport pilot/owner was conducting a personal cross-country flight. The pilot stated that, after the main landing gear touched down, he eased the backpressure on the control stick and that the nose landing gear (NLG) then separated from the airplane. The airplane slid on the runway surface.
Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the NLG had fractured at a weld area. An airplane manufacturer service bulletin (SB) called for periodic inspection of the NLG for cracks in the weld area every 25 hours. The pilot reported that the NLG had accumulated a total time in service of 371 hours at the time of the accident and that it was last inspected 31 flight hours before the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to inspect the nose landing gear (NLG), which resulted in a crack going undetected and the subsequent separation of the NLG at the weld area during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16LA157
- Event ID
- 20160419X61318
- Case number
- CEN16LA157
- 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: fc0daaf0b75a3294d7bb8d16d54a2a01047cff2a264d48c94d8881977e0aec77; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:18:30.692Z.