CEN23LA115 · Piper PA-34-200T
Piper PA-34-200T · Accident: landing gear not configured
From St Louis Downtown Airport (KCPS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN23LA115
- 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-34-200T
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-34
- 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
- N7681F
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From St Louis Downtown Airport (KCPS), Cahokia, ILTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 47 years (built 1976)
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that he was performing touch and go landings. On the fourth traffic pattern, the controller requested that he turn inside of the airplane that was on final approach. The pilot stated that he delayed extending the landing gear until he turned the airplane onto the final approach leg. After he reduced the airspeed, he selected flaps and extended the landing gear. During the landing, the pilot “heard the sound of metal” and realized that the landing gear was not extended. The pilot reported that when he moved the landing gear handle, he did not see the unsafe landing gear warning light, nor was there a landing gear warning horn. The airplane sustained damage to the lower fuselage. The mechanic that recovered the airplane after the accident reported that the landing gear extended normally, and the landing gear warning horn was audible. Further, the pilot reported to the responding inspector that he had just forgot to extend the landing gear.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to extent the landing gear before landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN23LA115
- Event ID
- 20230223106759
- Case number
- CEN23LA115
- 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: b27bb65a1cec0985ecbc838139456a91ddb468a37285968c24e8ac31e948ef04; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:21:41.864Z.