CEN22LA083 · Piper PA-30
Piper PA-30 · Accident: landing gear not configured
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN22LA083
- 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-30
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-30
- 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
- N19VS
- Operator
- Gardner James R
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 57 years (built 1964)
- 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
- 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 not configured
- 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 › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Psychological
- 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 flight instructor reported that he and the pilot receiving instruction and flying the airplane were returning to land after a multi-engine training flight. As the airplane touched down on the runway, they heard a scraping noise. The airplane settled onto its belly and came to a stop. The pilots exited the airplane and saw that the airplane’s landing gear was not extended. The flight instructor reentered the airplane and saw that the landing gear circuit breaker was popped. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the lower fuselage. Functionality tests of the normal and emergency landing gear extension/retraction systems and landing gear configuration light did not reveal any anomalies. The flight instructor reported that there were no other preaccident mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The instructed pilot and the flight instructor’s failure to extend the landing gear before landing resulting in a wheels up landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN22LA083
- Event ID
- 20211228104446
- Case number
- CEN22LA083
- 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, 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: 191bb94cc5383dfc984e2a1e9019dc8ae418df726d7959d28cdefb0215840840; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:51:05.682Z.