WPR23LA116 · Piper PA-24-260
Piper PA-24-260 · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Reid-Hillview Airport of Santa Clara County (RHV) to Half Moon Bay Airport (HAF)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR23LA116
- 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-24-260
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-24
- 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
- N9267P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Reid-Hillview Airport of Santa Clara County (RHV), San Jose, CATo Half Moon Bay Airport (HAF), Half Moon Bay, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 55 years (built 1968)
- 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 pilot reported the takeoff and flight were uneventful. During the landing approach, the landing gear did not extend. After performing a series of troubleshooting steps with no success, the pilot decided to return to his home airport and perform a manual gear extension. During the return flight, the manual gear system appeared to be jammed, so he continued to troubleshoot and performed a series of high-G maneuvers to help the gear extend. After multiple attempts the landing gear extended; however, the gear indication system did not show the gear was locked in the down position. The pilot continued with the landing, which was uneventful, until he retarded the throttle during the landing roll and the nose gear and main gear retracted.
Postaccident examination revealed that the landing gear extension motor would intermittently seize, often without tripping its circuit breaker. Because the airplane was equipped with an emergency gear extension system, this event alone should not have been cause for concern, and the pilot followed the correct procedures to resolve the problem. However, the manual emergency gear extension system was also jammed because of significant wear to its release arm. Additionally, due to a worn and out of adjustment nose gear drag link assembly, even when the pilot was able to force the gear down with the manual system, it did not lock in place. Due to the design of the system, this out of adjustment condition was masked by the landing gear motor transmission, which under normal operation drove the drag links into the locked position.
An airworthiness directive had been issued to resolve the gear collapse issue following manual extension, and this appeared to have been completed and was not due at the time of the accident. Even though it was not due, the wear observed to multiple landing gear components should have warranted further examination and repair by maintenance personnel during the annual inspection, which was completed one week before the accident.
Probable cause
A landing gear collapse due to an inadequately maintained landing gear extension and retraction system.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR23LA116
- Event ID
- 20230306106827
- Case number
- WPR23LA116
- 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: a42861648386290c1f0f83b9c89cda38982f1a98c117e25cda1f8dec1febe1bc; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:23:20.210Z.