CEN11IA114 · Diamond Aircraft IND Inc DA 40
Doss Aviation Diamond Aircraft IND Inc DA 40 · Incident: part(s) separation from aircraft during landing
From USAF Academy Airfield (AFF) to USAF Academy Airfield (AFF)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN11IA114
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- N326AF
- Operator
- Doss Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From USAF Academy Airfield (AFF), Colorado Springs, COTo USAF Academy Airfield (AFF), Colorado Springs, CO
- 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
- Part(s) separation from aircraft
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and student pilot were performing their fourth touch-and-go landing of the day when the student pilot bounced the airplane. The instructor determined that the bounce was not severe and allowed the student to remain on the controls for a second touchdown. As the airplane contacted the runway, the instructor observed the airplane’s nose wheel depart the airplane. The airplane skidded down the runway for about 120 feet on its main landing gear and nose wheel strut before coming to a stop. An examination of the nose landing gear determined that multiple fatigue cracks had originated in the forward machined pockets of the left and right sides of the nose wheel fork. The cracks propagated until the fork could no longer sustain the applied operational loads, at which point overload failure occurred. As a result of the investigation, the airplane manufacturer developed a reinforced nose wheel fork, and the operator conducted a one-time inspection of its fleet of airplanes to identify any other nose wheel forks with fatigue cracks. The operator also implemented a method to nondestructively inspect all their airplanes’ nose wheel forks for fatigue cracks on a periodic basis. Additionally, the operator evaluated and implemented ways to decrease low cycle, high intensity stress brought on by nose wheel shimmy during takeoffs and landings and published guidance outlining specific steps to take in the event of hard landings, bounces, nose wheel strikes, and excessive nose wheel shimmy or vibration.
Probable cause
Fatigue failure of the nose wheel fork, which resulted in separation of the nose wheel.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN11IA114
- Event ID
- 20101217X12037
- Case number
- CEN11IA114
- 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: 8223cd178c28a445599a54381c6625d7f385254851b00f231e8d3ff7eb0a7a23; retrieved 2026-09-15T15:37:55.232Z.