WPR24LA116 · Diamond Aircraft IND Inc DA 40 NG
Diamond Aircraft IND Inc DA 40 NG · Accident: hard landing
From Mesa Gateway Airport (IWA) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR24LA116
- 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 Aircraft IND Inc DA 40 NG
- 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
- N755LA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Mesa Gateway Airport (IWA), Mesa, AZTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 1 year (built 2023)
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor reported that the student pilot initially flared high for the landing and was instructed to lower the nose and add power to correct for the slow airspeed. The student pilot corrected to a normal landing attitude when a wind gust caused the airplane to drift to the left of centerline. Subsequently, the airplane began to sink towards the runway with the right wing down, which struck the runway. The airplane then bounced, and the instructor took control of the airplane and was able to safely recover and land the airplane. Post flight examination of the airplane revealed that the right aileron sustained substantial damage.
Both pilots stated that there were no preaccident failures or malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The student pilot’s improper landing flare, which resulted in a hard landing in gusty wind conditions. Contributing, was the failure of the flight instructor to intervene in a timely manner.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR24LA116
- Event ID
- 20240321193975
- Case number
- WPR24LA116
- 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, 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: 3f17f432ae535a83e613a73eb120f9c428dedc47176b7cf3ab7a3691bd16b120; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:37:05.753Z.