CEN22LA169 · Cessna 172RG
Cessna 172RG · Accident: landing gear not configured
From Pearland Regional Airport (LVJ) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN22LA169
- 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
Cessna 172RG
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N5338V
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Pearland Regional Airport (LVJ), Pearland, TXTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 42 years (built 1980)
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor reported that he and pilot receiving instruction had performed eight takeoffs and landings without incident. The flight instructor’s procedure was to perform the checklist items and select landing gear down when established on downwind in the traffic pattern. During the final traffic pattern, they became distracted and did not perform the checklist. The pilot receiving instruction reported that they did not lower the landing gear during the final approach and the airplane landed wheels up. The airplane sustained damage to the lower fuselage structure during the landing. Video footage provided by the airport manager showed the airplane’s landing gear fully retracted during the approach. Neither pilot recalled hearing the landing gear warning horn prior to the gear up landing. The mechanic that recovered and examined the airplane after the accident reported that the landing gear extended normally, and the landing gear warning horn was audible.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's failure to extend the landing gear and perform a before landing checklist.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN22LA169
- Event ID
- 20220408104915
- Case number
- CEN22LA169
- 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, 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: e6ab09a471c9312c6a34c0b0385dc6a6efa870cfc2e40af837645e064f587352; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:07:02.136Z.