ERA25LA263 · Piper PA34 200
ATA Flight School Piper PA34 200 · Accident: landing gear not configured
From Jacksonville Executive at Craig Airport (CRG) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA25LA263
- 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 PA34 200
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA34
- 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
- N1293T
- Operator
- ATA Flight School
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Jacksonville Executive at Craig Airport (CRG), Jacksonville, FLTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 53 years (built 1972)
- 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
- Personnel issues › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Being high in relation to destination airport, the flight instructor of the multi-engine airplane initiated a steep descent with the throttles at idle. During the descent, the landing gear warning horn sounded, which the flight instructor thought was the stall warning. After descending to traffic pattern altitude, the flight instructor transferred control back to the multi-engine student, who joined base-to-final leg of the airport traffic pattern. The student subsequently recommended either performing a go-around or squaring the base turn to final approach for landing. The flight instructor directed him to perform “S-turns” which he felt uncomfortable doing and the tower controller instructed them to maneuver as needed. The student then transferred control of the airplane back to the flight instructor either on the base leg or short final approach. While on short final approach (likely due to cockpit annunciation of either the radio altimeter or throttles being at idle with the landing gear not extended) the flight instructor recognized that the landing gear was not configured for landing and initiated a go-around. The airplane was too low and subsequently contacted the runway with the landing gear retracted, resulting in substantial damage to the underside of the fuselage. After raising the airplane from the runway, the landing gear was extended using the normal system with no reported issues.
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s inadequate supervision and delayed remedial actions during the landing approach, which resulted in the airplane contacting the runway with the landing gear retracted.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA25LA263
- Event ID
- 20250714200522
- Case number
- ERA25LA263
- 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, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2025-07-10.
- API snapshot SHA-256: fe33d4cca82c8b69b13d8c7da9ef83f29c23cd5d4b971cf315266270f5214d7d; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:04:46.841Z.