WPR26LA093 · Cessna 500 CITATION
Cessna 500 CITATION · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Idaho Falls Regional Airport (IDA) to Great Falls International Airport (GTF)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR26LA093
- 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
- Ongoing
- 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
Cessna 500 CITATION
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 500
- 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
- C-GJVK
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Idaho Falls Regional Airport (IDA), Idaho Falls, IDTo Great Falls International Airport (GTF), Great Falls, MT
- Aircraft age
- About 53 years (built 1973)
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On January 19, 2026, about 1303 mountain standard time, a Cessna 500 airplane, C-GJVK, was substantially damaged when it was involved in an accident at Great Falls International Airport (GTF), Great Falls, Montana. The pilot and passenger were not injured. The airplane was operated as a Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations personal flight. The pilot reported that during the approach he extended the landing gear and received an unsafe indication for the left main landing gear while the nose gear and right main landing gear indicated down and locked. He then moved the landing gear lever slightly and received a down and locked indication for the left main landing gear. All three landing gear down and locked lights were illuminated for the remainer of the approach. The landing was smooth and as the airplane slowed to about 30 knots, the pilot felt the left wing begin to lower and the left wing and flap then contacted the runway. The airplane veered slightly to the left and came to rest with the left wing over the grass and with the left main landing gear collapsed. Postaccident examination revealed that the airplane’s left wing sustained substantial damage. The airplane was recovered and retained for further examination.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR26LA093
- Event ID
- 20260202202376
- Case number
- WPR26LA093
- 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. 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: a34aa07b57b56bfadd81301b1e8b79e556be7ee11d21ddaba8d61dff4c46b81c; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:42:45.605Z.