ERA25LA268 · Piper PA46 350P
Pad Aviation Piper PA46 350P · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Chester County G O Carlson Airport (MQS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA25LA268
- 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 PA46 350P
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA46
- 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
- N962WF
- Operator
- Pad Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chester County G O Carlson Airport (MQS), Coatesville, PATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 26 years (built 1999)
- 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
According to the pilot, while on final approach, he confirmed that he had the flaps down and three green lights indicating the landing gear was down and locked. He touched down on the main landing gear and then the nose gear while using the rudder pedals to maintain directional control. Shortly after, the pilot noticed that the airplane was yawing to the left and the rudder pedals were no longer effective. The nose landing gear had collapsed, and the airplane departed the left side of the runway into a ditch, which resulted in substantial damage to the left wing. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed a broken engine mount where the nose landing gear retract cylinder was located. About 10 years before the accident, the airframe manufacturer issued a service bulletin requiring inspection of this area for cracking after each 100 hours of flight time. The bulletin described that, “Cracks may develop in the area of the nose gear actuator attach feet on the engine mount. This condition can occur when the nose landing gear is subjected to excessive loads due to hard landings, rough field operations, excessive speed turns, improper airplane towing (sudden, aggressive starts and stops), or other improper operations.” The mechanic who performed the last annual inspection stated that he had not completed the inspection specified by the service bulletin and that the airplane had accumulated 138 hours of flight time since the last compliance. Whether the nose landing gear collapse that occurred during the accident flight was the result of previous, undetected cracking or the landing on the accident flight was not determined.
Probable cause
Failure of the engine mount which resulted in a collapse of the nose landing gear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA25LA268
- Event ID
- 20250717200555
- Case number
- ERA25LA268
- 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: 8f8433e46f4b7197caf90985dc6926f340e3393b06fa920bda3b7383874ce343; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:05:43.560Z.