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Atlas / NTSB / CEN21LA460

NTSB CAROL · Event

Event CEN21LA460

2021-09-28 El Paso, Texas, United States Airport · ELP None 1 aircraft Status: Completed

Aircraft involved

Probable cause & findings

A faulty landing gear pressure switch prematurely deactivated the landing gear motor during extension, which resulted in the landing gear collapsing during rollout.

Factual narrative

During the landing rollout, the right main landing gear collapsed and the airplane veered to the right, which resulted in substantial damage to the horizontal stabilizer. Postaccident examination revealed that the landing gear electric motor would deactivate prematurely due to a faulty pressure switch that prevented full extension of the landing gear. No other landing gear anomalies were observed, including during manual operation of the landing gear hand pump. A landing gear maintenance discrepancy was recorded as “landing gear slow to operate, sometimes need to use handpump” during the last annual inspection. Maintenance personnel troubleshot the landing gear discrepancy and identified a pressure switch to be out of tolerance at 1,100 psi and shimmed the switch to 1,500 psi. During the approach to landing, the pilot recalled that the green landing gear down light was on and he did not hear the landing gear warning horn; however, both the landing gear down light and warning horn tested normally during the examination. Source: NTSB Aviation Accident Database Retrieved: 2026-02-12

NTSB Findings

Hierarchical cause / factor breakdown from the FAA bulk avdata database. Each finding tagged C (Cause) or F (Factor).

  • Personnel issues-Task performance-Use of equip/info-Use of checklist-Pilot
  • Aircraft-Aircraft systems-Landing gear system-Gear extension and retract sys-Inoperative

Verbatim from NTSB's published report. Source file NTSB_2021_CEN21LA460.txt. Findings + structured fields enriched from FAA avall.mdb. Full investigation docket on data.ntsb.gov ↗.

Related research

What the literature says.

Academic papers and agency reports matching this event's aircraft type or causal vocabulary (maintenance). Sourced from NASA NTRS, NTSB Safety Studies, FAA CAMI, AOPA Air Safety Institute, Embry-Riddle Scholarly Commons, arXiv, and the Semantic Scholar academic graph.

Browse the full corpus — academia portal ↗