Landing Gear Failure: What It Is, How It Happens, and What It Means for People Who Were Hurt

What "Landing Gear Failure" Means for What Happened on Your Flight

Landing gear is the system of wheels, struts, actuators and related parts that supports an aircraft while it taxis, takes off and lands. Most aircraft carry gear in three positions: a nose gear at the front (or a tail wheel on many older designs), a left main gear and a right main gear under the wings or fuselage.

"Failure" covers several different events. The gear may fail to extend before landing, which leads to a wheels-up or belly landing on the underside of the aircraft. It may extend but collapse on touchdown. It may fail to retract after takeoff. Or it may deploy only partly, with one or two legs down and the others up or unlocked. A nose-gear collapse and a main-gear collapse behave differently on the runway, and investigators treat them as different events.

These failures can happen on commercial airliners, regional jets, turboprops, small piston planes, helicopters with wheeled gear, and military aircraft. For a passenger, the label matters less than the sequence: what the crew announced, what the aircraft did, and where it came to rest. If you remember those details, writing them down while they are fresh gives an attorney, and later any expert, a starting point for comparing your account with what the investigation reconstructs.

Why the Gear May Have Failed on Your Flight: How the System Works and Breaks Down

If you are wondering what actually went wrong, it helps to know the few parts that have to work together. Hydraulic actuators push the gear down and pull it up. Mechanical uplocks hold it in the wheel well during flight, and downlocks keep each leg rigid once extended. Position sensors drive the cockpit lights showing whether each leg is up, down and locked, or in transit, and a horn or other alert sounds when the aircraft is set up to land and the gear is not down.

Most modern aircraft also carry a backup way to lower the gear: depending on the design, a gravity drop that lets the gear fall and lock under its own weight, a pneumatic system using stored pressure, or a manual crank.

Failures usually trace back to one of these points:

• Hydraulic fluid can leak away, or a pump can stop producing pressure.
• An actuator seal can fail.
• An uplock or downlock can jam, release or never engage.
• A sensor or indicator can fail, so the gear looks down when it is not locked.
• The strut or the trunnion, the pivot the leg swings on, can weaken from fatigue or corrosion.
• Parts can be put back together wrongly after maintenance.

A gear-unsafe light or horn does not by itself say which one happened. It may reflect a true mechanical failure or only a faulty sensor, and investigators work to tell the two apart.

When the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) learns of an unsafe condition in a type of aircraft or part, it can issue an airworthiness directive, a binding order requiring owners and operators to inspect, repair or replace the affected item. Whether a directive covered the gear system, and whether it was followed, is often one of the first records examined. The FAA describes this work on its airworthiness certification page. For an injured passenger, each of these failure points leads to a different question about who handled that part, which is something an attorney can help map against the records.

What Investigators Examine to Find Out Why the Gear Failed

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the independent federal agency that investigates civil aviation accidents, looks at every link in the chain. When it finishes, it states a probable cause: its official determination of the factor or factors most responsible for the accident, set out in the final report. The NTSB investigation process and how it differs from the FAA's role are separate topics, but the causes it weighs in gear cases usually fall into a few groups.

Maintenance error is one: gear reassembled wrongly after an inspection or overhaul, steps in the manufacturer's maintenance manual skipped, incorrect or unapproved parts installed, or required inspections not done.

A design or manufacturing defect is another: a part designed or built in a way that leaves it prone to fail under normal loads or ordinary conditions. That points toward a product claim against a maker, a different legal theory from a negligence claim against an operator or a mechanic.

Crew factors come next. A crew may not lower the gear because of distraction, a missed checklist item or an abnormal procedure not followed, or may respond incorrectly to a gear-unsafe warning. "Pilot error" is an investigative label, and no one can fairly apply it to a specific accident before the NTSB's final report says so.

Environmental and operating factors round out the list: hard landings that overstress gear parts, runway surface conditions and foreign object damage.

Investigations move in stages. An open case may have only a preliminary report, an early factual account that names no cause. A closed case has a final report with a probable cause. About any particular accident, the only reliable statement of cause is what the NTSB itself has published. If you are waiting on that report, it may help to know that the cause shapes which parties may be responsible, and that an attorney can review the records already available while the investigation continues.

Injuries a Landing Gear Failure Can Cause

A belly landing puts the fuselage on the runway at speed. People on board feel a sudden, violent slowing. Fuel can ignite, and the structure can be pushed into the cabin. A gear collapse on touchdown is just as abrupt: the aircraft can pitch nose-down or roll toward the failed side, throwing people against seats, overhead bins or the cabin wall, and it may leave the runway and strike obstacles.

The injuries reported in these events include:

• traumatic brain injury
• spinal cord injury
• fractures, including of the vertebrae, long bones and pelvis
• cuts and burns, especially where a fire follows
• crush injuries
• psychological injury, including acute stress disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder

Some gear failures end in a runway excursion, a fire or a structural breakup, and people die. A wrongful death claim, brought by surviving family members when a death results from another party's negligence or a defective product, follows the same liability questions as an injury claim. It is governed by state wrongful death law, and who may bring it differs from state to state.

The kind and severity of an injury bear on the categories of damages the law may allow, such as medical expenses, lost earnings, pain and suffering and, after a death, wrongful death damages. Which categories apply, and how they are measured, depend on the facts and on the law of the state involved. If you are living with a long recovery, those categories are the law's way of describing what an injury took from a person's life, and treatment records, bills and notes on missed work are what show it. Some injuries, including psychological ones, surface later, which is worth raising in any conversation with an attorney.

What Evidence Can Show What Went Wrong With the Gear

The aircraft's own paper trail usually comes first. Logbooks, work orders and inspection records show what gear maintenance was done, by whom and when, and whether required inspections and repairs happened at all.

For a passenger or family, much of the public record will come from the NTSB's docket for the investigation. It can include factual reports, witness statements, component examination reports and, at the end, the final report with its probable cause. Where an aircraft carries a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder, the NTSB obtains and analyzes them. Courts guard those recordings closely: under 49 U.S.C. § 1154, a party generally may not use discovery to obtain a cockpit recorder recording, or parts of a transcript the NTSB has not made public, unless a court reviews the material privately and decides it is needed for a fair trial, and then only under a protective order.

The FAA also keeps the Service Difficulty Reporting System, a public database of mechanical problems reported by operators and mechanics, including gear-system problems. Earlier reports on the same kind of part can matter.

The failed part itself may be the most telling piece. If it is preserved, a metallurgist or mechanical engineer can examine it for a fatigue crack, corrosion or a manufacturing flaw. Medical records, photographs and witness accounts complete the picture.

One federal rule shapes how all of this is used. Section 1154(b) states: "No part of a report of the Board, related to an accident or an investigation of an accident, may be admitted into evidence or used in a civil action for damages resulting from a matter mentioned in the report." In practice, the NTSB's conclusions cannot be used to prove a damages case, so each side builds its own proof, often through experts working from the physical evidence and records.

Evidence can be lost or altered over time. People who were hurt, and families after a death, often gather what they already hold, such as medical records, photos and any incident report, while the investigation is still under way.

Who May Bear Responsibility — and Why That Question Depends on the Facts

Responsibility in a gear failure tracks the cause, and more than one party can share it.

An operator or air carrier, a company that carries passengers or cargo for hire, has a duty to keep the aircraft airworthy and to fly it safely. Inadequate maintenance, ignoring airworthiness directives or poor crew training may support a negligence claim, which asks whether a duty was owed, whether it was breached, and whether that breach caused the harm.

A maintenance organization, such as an FAA-certificated repair station or an individual mechanic who worked on the gear, also owes a duty of care. Improper reassembly or failure to follow the maintenance manual may support a claim against the maintainer separate from any claim against the operator.

A manufacturer of the aircraft or of a specific gear part may face a product liability claim. Product liability can hold a maker or seller responsible for harm caused by a defective product, focusing on the product's condition rather than on proof of carelessness. Whether a defect existed and caused the failure is a question the evidence answers, and the rules differ by state.

The type of operation matters too. A charter (Part 135) operator is an air carrier certificated under Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 135, to fly on-demand or commuter service. Its duties differ from those of scheduled airlines operating under Part 121 and from private flying under Part 91.

Where you live and where the flight went down can change the rules that apply to your claim. Federal aviation regulations set minimum safety standards, but state tort law governs most injury and wrongful death claims, and limitation periods, fault rules and damages rules differ from state to state. In some accidents a federal statute applies instead; one example is the Death on the High Seas Act, the name 46 U.S.C. § 30301 gives to a federal chapter on deaths at sea, which can matter after an overwater crash. Whether it reaches a given accident depends on where that accident happened. How these layers fit together is covered on the site's aviation accident lawyer page.

The NTSB's work and a civil claim run on separate tracks. The NTSB aims to prevent future accidents, not to decide who pays. A civil claim is how an injured person or family may seek damages, and it typically depends on experts such as an accident reconstructionist, a mechanical or metallurgical engineer, a human factors specialist and medical witnesses. If you are trying to work out which of these parties and theories could fit what happened on your flight, a conversation with our attorney can help sort through the facts, the records and the deadlines that may apply in your state.