Piper PA-28R-200 N4922T accident near Everett, Washington

Probable cause

A hard landing likely made by the private pilot on a solo flight that preceded the dual instructional flight during which the wing damage became obvious.

NTSB analysis

The private pilot had recently failed the practical flight test for his commercial pilot certificate, so he and the flight instructor were scheduled to conduct several flights for the purpose of qualifying the pilot for another practical test. The two flew a dual flight, and, later that same day, the pilot conducted a solo flight in the same airplane. The next day, the flight instructor and the pilot conducted another dual flight in the accident airplane. During their departure from the origination airport, they noticed that the landing gear retraction time was unduly long, and the flight instructor remarked about it to the pilot at that time. They continued the departure, conducted some airwork, and then the pilot performed a landing at another airport. Both the pilot and the flight instructor described that landing as "hard;" however, the flight instructor reported that he had experienced harder landings in that and other airplanes. After landing, the pilots taxied the airplane back for departure, and during the climbout, the landing gear could not be retracted. They cycled the gear to no avail, left it extended, and flew back to the origination airport, where the pilot conducted an uneventful landing. Postflight examination of the airplane revealed that the wing structure near the attach point for the left main landing gear was substantially damaged. Review of the airplane maintenance records revealed that the airplane satisfactorily passed a 50-hour inspection just prior to the dual and solo flights. Review of the airplane flight log revealed that no one other than the flight instructor and the pilot flew the airplane between the inspection and the discovery of the damage. Based on the initial gear retraction anomaly and the flight instructor’s categorization of the subsequent hard landing, it is likely that that landing was not the event that caused the damage. Instead, the damage, which had to have occurred after the 50-hour maintenance inspection, likely happened the day before the damage discovery, and the hard landing during the dual flight was the event that caused the visible external manifestation of the preexisting internal wing structural damage. The fact that the same pilot who made the hard landing flew the airplane solo the day before allows for the possibility that he initiated the damage sequence during the solo flight and either did not know it or did not report it.

Text from the NTSB. Open the NTSB docket for WPR12LA377 for the full record.