ERA09CA341 · Diamond Aircraft IND Inc DA 40
Diamond Aircraft IND Inc DA 40 · Accident: hard landing
From Brandywine Regional Airport (OQN) to Brandywine Regional Airport (OQN)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA09CA341
- 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
- N659PS
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Brandywine Regional Airport (OQN), West Chester, PATo Brandywine Regional Airport (OQN), West Chester, PA
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The certificated flight instructor and his student remained in the airport traffic pattern to practice several full-stop landings. While on approach the student flared high and the airplane dropped 8 to 10 feet, contacting the 3,375-foot-long by 50-foot-wide runway and then bouncing back into the air. While the pilot initiated a go-around, the airplane drifted left of the runway and the airplane's left wing impacted trees. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the wing spar and came to rest on the edge of the runway. Neither the flight instructor nor the student reported any mechanical failures or malfunctions of the airplane.
Probable cause
The student pilot’s improper recovery from a bounced landing. Contributing to the accident was the flight instructor’s inadequate remedial action.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA09CA341
- Event ID
- 20090613X54043
- Case number
- ERA09CA341
- 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: 1d90ffbeaa75e0fb6b4d9ccfb021eeda39b99264529c4bb9fbe2df23dc2380ac; retrieved 2026-09-15T11:24:46.420Z.