CEN26LA124 · Piper PA-28RT-201
Metro Aircraft Piper PA-28RT-201 · Accident: landing gear not configured
From Flying Cloud Airport (FCM) to Flying Cloud Airport (FCM)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN26LA124
- 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 PA-28RT-201
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N279SR
- Operator
- Metro Aircraft
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Flying Cloud Airport (FCM), Eden Prairie, MNTo Flying Cloud Airport (FCM), Eden Prairie, MN
- Aircraft age
- About 47 years (built 1979)
- 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
- 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
During an instructional flight, the flight instructor and pilot receiving instruction completed air work followed by simulated power-off landings. According to the flight instructor, while on the downwind leg of the traffic pattern, the pilot receiving instruction “broke the sterile cockpit,” did not complete the checklist, and did not extend the landing gear. The flight instructor reported that she became distracted and did not confirm that the student extended the landing gear. During the landing, the airplane sustained substantial damage to the lower fuselage longerons. The flight instructor stated there were no mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to extend the landing gear before landing and the flight instructor’s inadequate supervision of the flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN26LA124
- Event ID
- 20260224202496
- Case number
- CEN26LA124
- 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: 253a3668274645b1316b127152de9a11ac525ae0fe3f21b3c3a429b813e37553; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:50:07.763Z.