CEN21LA256 · Piper PA-28-161
Piper PA-28-161 · Accident: landing gear collapse
From San Angelo Regional Mathis Field (SJT) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN21LA256
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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-28-161
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N2120J
- Operator
- Nuytten Patrick
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From San Angelo Regional Mathis Field (SJT), San Angelo, TXTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 43 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor stated that, during the landing roll, the left main landing gear collapsed, and the airplane veered left, which damaged the left wing. Examination of the left main landing gear strut revealed that several mounting holes were elongated, consistent with wear over an extended period, and several bolts were missing.
The landing gear strut’s missing bolts and loose hardware likely resulted in the failure of the remaining fasteners to support the airplane’s weight and resulted in the landing gear collapse. Although the airplane’s maintenance records were not made available for review and the maintenance history of the landing gear could not be determined, the elongated mounting holes and missing bolts were consistent with maintenance personnel’s failure to ensure that proper torque was applied to the landing gear strut hardware.
Probable cause
Inadequate maintenance of the left main landing gear strut, which resulted in a landing gear collapse.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN21LA256
- Event ID
- 20210609103233
- Case number
- CEN21LA256
- 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: local date, investigation status, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2021-06-03.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 6744a406a047ca4d61335e3c98c3e17e598fa80a103b468f805cb3b8b81bea53; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:08:37.116Z.