CEN20CA212 · Piper PA28R 201T
Piper PA28R 201T · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Boerne Stage Field (5C1) to Corpus Christi International Airport (CRP)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN20CA212
- 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 PA28R 201T
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA28
- 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
- N533K
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Boerne Stage Field (5C1), Boerne, TXTo Corpus Christi International Airport (CRP), Corpus Christi, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 43 years (built 1977)
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot reported that during a visual approach for landing at the destination airport, the landing gear position indicator did not indicate that the landing gear was down and locked after it was selected down. The pilot reported he requested a fly by the air traffic control tower, which confirmed the landing gear was extended and cleared the airplane to land. During landing rollout, the landing gear collapsed, and the airplane impacted the runway surface resulting in structural damage to the external longerons on the bottom of the fuselage. During recovery of the airplane, it was noted the landing gear circuit breaker was popped. The circuit breaker was reset, the master switch selected on, and the landing gear was lowered using the landing gear handle. A postaccident functional test of the landing gear using the normal and emergency extension procedures revealed the landing gear extended without incident. The pilot further reported that after maintenance personnel removed the cockpit multifunction displays, he found a piece of screw/nut on the contacts of the landing gear control handle behind the instrument panel, which most-likely created a short-circuit and caused the landing gear circuit breaker to pop. The pilot did not use the airplane's emergency landing gear extension procedure to extend the landing gear during the accident flight.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to utilze the emergency landing gear extension procedure after a short-circuit within the normal landing gear system, which resulted in a landing gear collapse during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN20CA212
- Event ID
- 20200604X33444
- Case number
- CEN20CA212
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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, cause areas. 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: 76cf41b34c0383db87f827ac2900a344bb8f443a65f2eb545a3f0f73f6d64bd2; retrieved 2026-09-16T11:45:56.320Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: destination. CRP is Corpus Christi International Airport; the recorded city name is misspelled.