ERA09CA299 · Diamond Aircraft IND Inc DA 40
Mac Dan Aviation Diamond Aircraft IND Inc DA 40 · Accident: hard landing
From Orange County Airport (MGJ) to Orange County Airport (MGJ)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA09CA299
- 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 IND Inc DA 40
- Aircraft type
- Diamond DA-40
- 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
- N482MA
- Operator
- Mac Dan Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Orange County Airport (MGJ), Montgomery, NYTo Orange County Airport (MGJ), Montgomery, NY
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- Defining eventThe 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
- Hard landing
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor (CFI), who had 4 total hours as a CFI at the time of the accident, was conducting an instructional flight with a student pilot. The student pilot made 3 touch-and-go landings to Runway 21. The surface winds at the airport were 200 degrees at 12 knots. The CFI stated that the student did not maintain airspeed, resulting in a sink rate on the previous approaches. He instructed the student to conduct a short field approach with an obstacle. The student conducted the before landing check, lowered the flaps to the first notch and turned on base. The student lowered flaps to the full down position, turned final, and continued the approach. The airplane descended to 25 feet over the runway when the airspeed decreased and the airplane entered a vertical rate of descent. The student pilot did not apply power. The CFI reached over to add power, missed the throttle, flared the airplane, and it collided with the runway hard, resulting in structural damage to the airframe. No mechanical problems were reported by the CFI.
Probable cause
The student pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control on landing. Contributing to the accident was the flight instructor's lack of total experience as an instructor and delayed corrective action.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA09CA299
- Event ID
- 20090522X83152
- Case number
- ERA09CA299
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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. 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: a73f17309ae4db436171aa4b8d013acc66f4f79ae7ac584c5ca96deb7240ca07; retrieved 2026-09-15T11:09:11.402Z.