WPR23LA324 · Diamond DA20
Diamond DA20 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Spanish Fork Municipal Airport/Woodhouse Field (SPK) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR23LA324
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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 DA20
- Aircraft type
- Diamond DA20
- 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
- N989PA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Spanish Fork Municipal Airport/Woodhouse Field (SPK), Spanish Fork, UTTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 21 years (built 2002)
- 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
- En route · descent
- 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
- Loss of engine power (total)
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor reported that while conducting a simulated engine failure, the student terminated the maneuver, with the fuel mixture leaned, by advancing the throttle. The engine did not respond with full power, and the flight instructor then “advanced” the mixture. The engine subsequently lost total power. The flight instructor attempted but could not restart the engine. The flight instructor then selected an off-airport landing site, and during the landing roll, the airplane impacted a dirt “berm” which resulted in substantial damage to the fuselage. Postaccident examination of the airplane by the flight instructor revealed the mixture was not in the full rich position and the fuel pump switch was not in the on position, which was contrary to the checklist for engine failure after takeoff procedures. According to the owner, who conducted a postaccident engine test run, the engine exhibited no mechanical malfunctions or anomalies that would have precluded normal operations.
Probable cause
The flight pilots improper fuel management, which resulted a total loss of engine power, and impact with terrain during an off-airport landing. Contributing to the accident was the flight instructor’s failure to follow the airplane checklist.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR23LA324
- Event ID
- 20230825192945
- Case number
- WPR23LA324
- 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, coordinates, cause areas. 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: 9bcfb78f1e7e3df043f7ed804593bd1ecfd241c3c97e68c6eb24d4b763213d58; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:02:59.559Z.