ERA25LA105 · Piper PA44 180
Aa Aero Piper PA44 180 · Accident: landing gear not configured
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA25LA105
- 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
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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 PA44 180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA44
- 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
- N711AV
- Operator
- Aa Aero
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 36 years (built 1989)
- 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 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During an instructional flight, while approaching the runway to land, the flight instructor told the pilot receiving instruction to check that the landing gear had been extended. While the instructor handled radio transmissions and watched an aircraft that was still on the runway, the pilot receiving instruction performed the prelanding checklist but did not extend the landing gear. Due to the distraction of the radios and traffic on the runway, the instructor did not notice that the landing gear remained stowed. During the flare to land, both pilots realized the landing gear remained up and the airplane settled onto the runway with the landing gear retracted. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the lower fuselage. Postaccident examination of the landing gear and landing gear position warning system revealed no evidence of any preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to extend the landing gear prior to landing, which resulted in a gear up landing. Contributing to the accident was the flight instructor’s inadequate supervision of the pilot receiving instruction.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA25LA105
- Event ID
- 20250127199598
- Case number
- ERA25LA105
- 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, coordinates, 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: f03b14625fbd52bc9c0a78c80ebad04e260c44c343231ed1b33015e2a93ca682; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:37:28.485Z.