WPR20LA290 · Diamond DA 40
CAE Oxford Aviation Academy Diamond DA 40 · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Falcon Field (FFZ) to Benson Municipal Airport/Paul Kerchum Field (E95)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR20LA290
- 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 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
- N386MA
- Operator
- CAE Oxford Aviation Academy
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Falcon Field (FFZ), Mesa, AZTo Benson Municipal Airport/Paul Kerchum Field (E95), Benson, AZ
- Aircraft age
- About 16 years (built 2004)
- 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
- Landing gear collapse
- 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 systems
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilots were performing an instructional flight and completed a normal approach to the destination runway. The main landing gear touched down on the runway surface first and as soon as the nose lowered, the nose landing gear collapsed.
The nose landing gear fork assembly had collapsed when a pivot-axle welded to the arm in the nose landing gear welding assembly fractured. A metallurgical examination revealed the pivot-axle fracture surface exhibited two opposite facing fatigue cracks propagating inward on the pivot-axle due to reverse bending, consistent with repeated landing forces and cycles prior to the accident. The cracks propagated until the remaining pivot-axle cross section could not withstand the loads on the last landing cycle and succumbed to fracture from overstress.
The location of the crack’s origins required disassembly to detect. Therefore, it would not have been easily detected during routine maintenance. Following this accident, the manufacturer issued a mandatory service bulletin to routinely inspect the nose landing gear for cracks using dye penetrant.
Probable cause
The failure of the nose landing due to fatigue cracking.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR20LA290
- Event ID
- 20200828X31911
- Case number
- WPR20LA290
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2020-08-20.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 4da766a7e418057f1d11e66c5ab78990c1f6d73d96d66dd3c2ab57fd7b705b22; retrieved 2026-09-16T12:56:57.550Z.