ERA24LA185 · Bailey-Moyes Dragonfly
Bailey-Moyes Dragonfly · Accident: aircraft structural failure during initial climb
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA185
- 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
- 1 · 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
Bailey-Moyes Dragonfly
- Aircraft type
- Bailey Moyes DRAGONFLY
- 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
- UNREG
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Built the same year (2024)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Aircraft structural failure
- 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 structures
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to witnesses, the airplane departed and climbed to an altitude about 200 to 300 ft above ground level and then turned before the right wing “folded upward” and the airplane descended in a spiral to the ground. Postaccident examination revealed that the right lower wing strut attachment was not properly assembled; the bolt intended to connect the wing strut block to the fuselage bulkhead was threaded through the fuselage structure and tightened, but had not passed through the hole in the strut block, resulting in no load-bearing connection between the wing strut and the fuselage. The absence of deformation or damage to the bolt and wing strut block at the attachment point was consistent with the improper installation of the bolt. Without the structural support of the right lower wing strut, the wing was unable to sustain the aerodynamic loads encountered during the initial climb, resulting in an in-flight structural failure of the right wing. The accident flight was the airplane’s first flight since it was assembled by the pilot. The airplane was unregistered and had not been issued an airworthiness certificate or operating limitations, nor had it been inspected by a designated airworthiness representative or an FAA inspector before the flight.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper installation and inspection of the right lower wing strut attachment bolt, which resulted in the inflight failure of the right wing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA185
- Event ID
- 20240419194119
- Case number
- ERA24LA185
- 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: e9fa013c4d42c7817ab7f6e38e50ac13f33d1d86afc0a16983f41d9c7a6e4b7f; retrieved 2026-09-15T08:12:53.935Z.