WPR26LA145 · Cessna 421B
Cessna 421B · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Los Alamos Airport (LAM) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR26LA145
- 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
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- 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 421B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 421
- 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
- N799TF
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Los Alamos Airport (LAM), Los Alamos, NMTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 54 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 · 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 March 27, 2026, about 1630 Pacific daylight time, a Cessna 421B, N799TF, was substantially damaged when it was involved in an accident near Sedona, Arizona. The pilot and pilot rated passenger were not injured. The airplane was operated as a Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 personal flight. According to the pilot, the preflight checks, flight from Los Alamos Airport (LAM), Los Alamos, New Mexico, and approach to landing at Sedona Airport (SEZ), Sedona, Arizona, were uneventful. During the pre-landing checks, the pilot observed three green lights, indicating that all three landing gear legs were locked in the down position. After touchdown on runway 21 the airplane began to yaw to the right and progressed to a “heavy pull.” The pilot applied full left rudder to counteract the right yaw, and the airplane remained on centerline, initially. As the airplane slowed during the landing roll, the right yaw resumed and the left rudder correction became ineffective. Subsequently, the airplane exited the right side of the runway and impacted two taxiway signs. All three landing gear collapsed, and the airplane continued through a ditch before it came to rest upright in a grassy area adjacent to the runway. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the right wing, left horizontal stabilizer, and fuselage were substantially damaged. The wreckage was retained for further examination.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR26LA145
- Event ID
- 20260330202719
- Case number
- WPR26LA145
- 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: 5bf6f7a3678bf7cf8e1750f795db66862411dae4b1f8d0254ff1730e3fc3e182; retrieved 2026-09-16T21:06:20.736Z.