WPR24LA110 · Beech 60
Beech 60 · Accident: system/component malfunction/failure (non-power) during landing
From Phoenix Goodyear Airport (GYR) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR24LA110
- 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
Beech 60
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 60
- 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
- N167U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Phoenix Goodyear Airport (GYR), Goodyear, AZTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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
- System/component malfunction/failure (non-power)
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After an uneventful flight, the pilot attempted to extend the landing gear in preparation for landing and observed that the left main landing gear green light annunciator was extinguished. He cycled the landing gear, changed the annunciator light bulb, and attempted to manually extend the landing gear; however, the pilot was unable to extend the landing gear or prompt a green light on the instrument panel to indicate the left main landing gear was down. The pilot then landed with the left main gear retracted, which resulted in substantial damage to the left wing. Postaccident examination of the landing gear system revealed that the gear motor functioned normally. Both manual and automatic extension of the left main landing gear failed due to a separation in the retraction rod assembly. The main gear retract system includes a pressure boot that is attached to a bushing on the retract rod assembly that extends and retracts the landing gear. A metallurgical examination of the landing gear retract rod found that the rod fractured due to buckling from compression overload during the landing gear extension. The primer on the rod was worn where the bushing for the pressure boot slides along the rod during extension and retraction operations, which exposed the underlying steel surfaces to oxidation. The bushing likely seized on the corroded (oxidized) rod near the retracted position due to increased friction from the accumulation of corrosion products. The rod then buckled during normal extension operations due to constraint from the pressure boot and the seized bushing. With the rod segment outboard of the bushing held in place near the retracted position by the pressure boot and seized bushing, the left main landing gear would not have been able to extend when the main landing gear actuator rotated to extend the gear. The maintenance logbooks indicated that the retract rod would have been inspected during the annual inspection seven months before the accident; however, it is unknown if a visual inspection would have found the wear on the retract rod.
Probable cause
Corrosion on a landing gear retract rod assembly which precluded an extension of the gear and resulted in a gear-up landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR24LA110
- Event ID
- 20240312193931
- Case number
- WPR24LA110
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2024-03-11.
- API snapshot SHA-256: c0d82c328886e4977cdd4c757fc993247303e491f4cd37dce1926a2a2208c066; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:35:39.861Z.