WPR24LA275 · Piper PA-30
Piper PA-30 · Accident: system/component malfunction/failure (non-power) on approach
From Sacramento Executive Airport (KSAC) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR24LA275
- 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-30
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-30
- 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
- N8458Y
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sacramento Executive Airport (KSAC), Sacramento, CATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 57 years (built 1967)
- 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
- Approach
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was cleared for landing at the destination airport. After extending the landing gear, he performed a pre-landing check and noticed that the landing gear switch was in the down position, while the annunciator showed the gear in the retracted position. The pilot attempted to cycle the landing gear multiple times, but was unsuccessful in extending the gear. He then overflew the runway and the tower controller noted that the landing gear was only partially extended. The pilot cycled the landing gear again, attempted to shake the gear loose with abrupt maneuvers, and attempted to manually extend the gear, but remained unsuccessful. The pilot elected to land with the gear partially extended, which resulted in substantial damage to the fuselage. The landing gear was cycled multiple times during a postaccident examination, but the landing gear failure could not be reproduced. Functional testing of the manual gear extension revealed that the system did not function as designed. During tests, the gear release arm was moved in accordance with the pilot’s operating handbook instructions, yet the manual extension failed to release the landing gear. Further examination found that inadequate clearance between the push/pull rod clevis and lightening hole resulted in resistance that inhibited the release tube and torque tube from decoupling. The landing gear would manually extend when the release arm and clevis were pushed away from the lightening hole. The binding and damage to the side wall from its interaction with the push/pull rod clevis was indicative of long-term wear; however, when this interference began could not be determined based on the available information. The airplane had accrued a total of 36 flight hours in the 8 years before the accident and had received only two annual inspections during that time. Both annual inspections required a visual inspection of the side wall and push/pull clevis, which should have identified the binding between the two components.
Probable cause
The failure of the main landing gear to extend and lock for reasons that could not be determined based on the available information. Contributing to the accident was a mechanical failure of the manual landing gear release mechanism due to inadequate clearance between the release linkage and side structure and maintenance personnel’s failure to identify the interference during previous annual inspections.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR24LA275
- Event ID
- 20240813194922
- Case number
- WPR24LA275
- 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 2024-08-09.
- API snapshot SHA-256: aa764b66586ec7e835aada24653949b8342bbb5b74044eef44b4c811e5831cb2; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:09:57.347Z.