ERA24LA002 · Piper PA-28-180
Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Yeager Airport (CRW) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA002
- 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
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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-28-180
- 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
- N7461W
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Yeager Airport (CRW), Charleston, WVTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 60 years (built 1963)
- 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 oper/perf/capability
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot approached the runway for landing and described that the main landing gear first touched down first. The nose landing gear then contacted the runway and immediately collapsed. The student pilot applied the brakes and the airplane departed the left side of the runway onto the grass. The airplane struck a lighting system and came to rest about 35 ft from the runway, which resulted in substantial damage to the right wing. The student pilot reported “there were no visible signs of mechanical failure” on the nose landing gear prior to the accident flight, and a Federal Aviation Administration inspector who examined the nose landing gear after the accident did not observe any mechanical discrepancies.
Probable cause
A collapse of the nose landing gear during landing, which resulted in a runway excursion and collision with an approach lighting system.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA002
- Event ID
- 20231003193186
- Case number
- ERA24LA002
- 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: fecfbea446612334922394156bbe26c6310b156ed52aeff65ea645748ef714c7; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:11:31.716Z.