ERA24LA275 · Piper PA23 250
Box Aviation Piper PA23 250 · Accident: landing gear collapse
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA275
- 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 PA23 250
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA23
- 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
- N14175
- Operator
- Box Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 53 years (built 1971)
- 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 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that he was completing a practice instrument approach, and after extending the landing gear he saw 3 green lights, indicating the landing gear were down and locked. He continued the approach as normal and touched down on the main landing gear, but as the nose lowered it continued “straight to the ground.” The airplane skidded on its nose down the runway before coming to a stop. The forward lower portion of the airplane’s fuselage was substantially damaged. Following the accident, the nose landing gear actuator was removed, and bench-tested under the supervision of a Federal Aviation Administration inspector. The test revealed that when hydraulic pressure was removed from extension side of the actuator it began an uncommanded movement in the opposite, landing gear retraction, direction. This uncommanded movement was likely due to internal leakage in the actuator, which would have prevented the nose landing gear from remaining in the fully down and locked position.
Probable cause
The failure of the nose landing gear actuator to maintain a fully down and locked position.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA275
- Event ID
- 20240625194545
- Case number
- ERA24LA275
- 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: 910966401ffc7af3ca4404cc3843b5469642f06ca28f4386a039ead7793829a8; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:57:55.423Z.