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WPR24LA278 · Cirrus Design Corp SF50

9 Aug 2024 · Watsonville, CA, United States

Cirrus Design Corp SF50 · Accident: landing gear collapse

From Ogden Hinckley Airport (OGD) to an unrecorded destination

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Event

NTSB case
WPR24LA278
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

Cirrus Design Corp SF50

Aircraft type
Cirrus SF50
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
N727VB
Operator
Unknown
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Ogden Hinckley Airport (OGD), Ogden, UTTo not recorded
Aircraft age
About 1 year (built 2023)
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 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 reported that during the landing roll, about the time that he was applying the brakes, the nose landing gear collapsed. Having no training on what to do in this scenario, he cycled the landing gear by raising then lowering the landing gear control handle. Postflight inspection revealed substantial to the undercarriage near the nose landing gear bay. Stored onboard central maintenance computer (CMC) data showed that before touchdown the airplane was properly configured for landing with the flaps at 100%; the nose and both main landing gear were down and locked. After touchdown and during the landing roll, while both weight-on-wheels switches were temporarily unloaded, the landing gear handle was raised and then lowered, which unlocked the nose gear and allowed it to collapse. Additionally, both main landing gear became unlocked, but re-locked before they could collapse. After the nose gear collapse, the gear handle indicated an unexplained 4-second anomaly by indicating neither up nor down, then indicating down. Postaccident examination and a landing gear swing test revealed no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. A missing nose landing gear locking spring from the nose gear assembly was not causal to the accident. The flaps selector switch was located below the landing gear control handle. Further review of CMC data showed that the operators of the airplane often raise the flaps within seconds after touchdown, which was about the time that the nose landing gear collapsed. Although the pilot was familiar with the airplane and had accrued about 102 flight hours within the past 90 days, it is likely that the pilot inadvertently raised the landing gear control handle during the landing roll instead of selecting the flap selector switch to 0%.

Probable cause

The pilot’s inadvertent use of the landing gear control handle instead of the flaps selector switch during the landing rollout, which resulted in the collapse of the nose landing gear.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record WPR24LA278
Event ID
20240814194931
Case number
WPR24LA278
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 2024-08-10.
  • API snapshot SHA-256: 0b5f8ebac43161091b81d8a3212bfcd332a788cc9c7431d979a95eaa5a967a33; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:10:14.719Z.