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Atlas / NTSB / ERA25LA168

NTSB CAROL · Event

Event ERA25LA168

2025-04-04 Vero Beach, Florida, United States Airport · VRB None 1 aircraft Status: Completed

Registry · N333SE

FAA Aircraft Registry record.

Make / Model

PIPER PA-34-200

Year of manufacture

1973 · 52 years old at event

Engine

LYCOMING I0360 SER (180 hp)

Seats / Engines

7 seats · 2 engines

Last airworthiness date

19730116

ADS-B equipped

Yes — Mode-S A3A289

Registrant of record

PARIS AIR INC

Source: FAA Aircraft Registry (releasable master file).

Aircraft involved

Probable cause & findings

Separation of the lower nose landing gear down lock link bolt, which resulted in a collapse of the nose landing gear during landing.

Factual narrative

The student and flight instructor of the multi-engine airplane departed for a training flight and initially planned to practice touch-and-go landings in the airport traffic pattern. After performing a go-around during the initial landing attempt, the flight instructor described that the student configured the airplane for landing and verified that the landing gear were extended. About 2 seconds after the airplane touched down on the runway normally, the nose landing gear collapsed. The airplane came to rest on the runway and the lower forward fuselage was substantially damaged. Postaccident examination of the landing gear revealed that the lower bolt, which secured the nose landing gear down lock link to the lower drag link, was missing. The bolt was not found after the accident. Without this bolt, the nose landing gear could not remain in a locked position after it was extended. Given this information, it is likely that the bolt separated during the flight, which resulted in the nose landing gear collapse during the subsequent landing. 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).

  • Aircraft-Aircraft systems-Landing gear system-Gear extension and retract sys-Failure

Verbatim from NTSB's published report. Source file NTSB_2025_ERA25LA168.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 (go-around). 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 ↗