IAD05CA056 · Diamond Aircraft Industries DA40
AV-ED Flight School Diamond Aircraft Industries DA40 · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From Leesburg Executive Airport (JYO) to JYO
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD05CA056
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Diamond Aircraft Industries DA40
- Aircraft type
- Diamond DA40
- 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
- N127X
- Operator
- AV-ED Flight School
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Leesburg Executive Airport (JYO), Leesburg, VATo JYO
- 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
- Landing
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Directional control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The accident took place during a solo flight, the student pilot was attempting to perform a landing on runway 35. During the "roundout," and prior to the flare, the airplane began to drift to the left side of the runway. The pilot attempted to correct, but was unable to maintain his position over the runway centerline. The airplane continued to drift over the grassy area on the west side of the runway, approaching the trees that bordered the airport. He then thought that because he did not have complete control of the airplane, it was time to end the flight by landing on the grassy area. The airplane impacted in up sloping terrain and was substantially damaged. Examination of the airplane's mechanical and flight control systems was conducted and control continuity was verified. No pre-accident malfunctions were discovered. At the time of the accident the pilot had accumulated approximately 38.7 total hours of flight experience, all of which were in the accident airplane make and model.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain directional control. Factors contributing to the accident were the pilots lack of experience, and the uphill terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD05CA056
- Event ID
- 20050509X00574
- Case number
- IAD05CA056
- 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: investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: b20612586d2ec306e316c8bfff37bba61480a0f9a4fb31271850a26da194b975; retrieved 2026-09-22T06:03:22.446Z.