ERA24LA218 · Mooney Aircraft CORP. M20K
Mooney Aircraft CORP. M20K · Accident: landing gear not configured
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA218
- 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
Mooney Aircraft CORP. M20K
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N3777
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 39 years (built 1985)
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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 as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane had just undergone an annual inspection and the pilot was returning to the airport after conducting a post-maintenance flight test. The pilot stated that he made a normal approach to land with both the flaps and landing gear extended. He further described that upon landing, the airplane settled to the runway, and skidded to a stop resulting in substantial damage to the lower fuselage. A postaccident examination of the airplane revealed minor damage to the nose landing gear door and no damage to the main landing gear doors. The landing gear was subsequently cycled several times using both normal and emergency methods. No evidence of any preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures were noted that would have precluded normal operation of the landing gear system. Based on this information, it is most likely that the pilot landed the airplane with the landing gear still retracted.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to extend the landing gear before landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA218
- Event ID
- 20240516194268
- Case number
- ERA24LA218
- 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: 87a1478f8cd6bb2604e0a1b62a1f59c57539c2c769c6555e628797a322de76bb; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:46:16.699Z.