DEN99LA060 · Diamond Aircraft Industries DA 20-A1
The Global Group Diamond Aircraft Industries DA 20-A1 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Durango La Plata County Airport (DRO) to Santa Fe Municipal Airport (SAF)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN99LA060
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Diamond Aircraft Industries DA 20-A1
- Aircraft type
- Diamond DA-20
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N528SS
- Operator
- The Global Group
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Durango La Plata County Airport (DRO), Durango, COTo Santa Fe Municipal Airport (SAF), SANTE FE, NM
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- En route · cruise
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- In flight encounter with weather
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC); Tree(s)
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Flight into adverse weather, inadvertent
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, continued
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot and his pilot-rated passenger were flying cross-country for the purpose of building flight time. The pilot assumed the role of PIC for the leg from Durango to their intended destination of Santa Fe. During a stop earlier in the day in Las Vegas, the passenger checked the weather using a computer located in the terminal, which called for low clouds and a narrow temperature/dew point spread at the airport in Santa Fe. He did not obtain SIGMETS. While in cruise flight, he and his passenger began to encounter snow, fog and rain. While attempting to climb, he entered instrument meteorological conditions. The aircraft then impacted the trees in a 90 right bank and at a 45 degree downward pitch. The aircraft came to rest in an inverted position along a 45 degree inclining mountainous slope covered by several feet of snow. The aircraft was not IFR equipped.
Probable cause
The pilot-in-command's inadvertent flight into adverse weather, and his continued flight into instrument meteorological conditions. Factors were his failure to obtain an updated recorded weather briefing, the existing weather conditions which included snow, fog and rain, and the aircraft not being IFR equipped.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN99LA060
- Event ID
- 20001205X00315
- Case number
- DEN99LA060
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1999-03-27.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 60fe75d6e0dd3aa251175f2c17e3e90bb822f64d87c2f84a2778756cb4733748; retrieved 2026-09-21T20:34:49.522Z.