History of Flight
The student pilot, with 47 hours on type, was conducting a solo training flight from Wycombe Air Park. After an uneventful flight, he noticed an unusual vibration while descending for landing. He aborted the first approach and continued in the circuit. During a subsequent landing, the nose dropped abnormally after touchdown, prompting the pilot to apply full throttle and go around. Air traffic control informed him that the nose landing gear had detached. The Chief Flying Instructor then provided guidance, talking the pilot through the final approach and landing. The aircraft touched down on the main wheels, and the nose was held up until it eventually lowered, causing the propeller to strike the ground. The pilot shut down the aircraft and exited uninjured.
Examination
The lower section of the nose landing gear was recovered from the runway. The cylinder had fractured at the location of a lubrication groove near its lower end, just above the lower support flange. Fractography revealed a small area of fatigue cracking around the outer circumference, along with a larger overload failure area. Additional pre-existing fatigue cracks were propagating around the groove. The nose landing gear had been installed in November 2000 and accumulated 674 hours before failure.
Inspection Requirements
Similar nose landing gear failures had occurred previously on other PA-38 aircraft. In response, a safety recommendation in 1993 led Piper to introduce a dye penetrant inspection requirement for the nose gear strut housing at 1,000-hour intervals, repeated every 500 hours. However, the requirement was not made mandatory, and an error in the maintenance manual insertion caused confusion about the correct component to inspect. For G-BMVM, the 674-hour service life meant the inspection was not yet due. The maintenance organisation stated they were unclear about the requirement and had not been performing the inspections. They noted that if the requirement had been mandatory or communicated via service information, it would have been carried out.