You know the routine—every month we review the NTSB reports of the 100 most recent accidents of the type of airplane featured in the Used Aircraft Guide. We then pigeonhole them by cause, looking for areas of concern for buyers and users of those airplanes. Not surprisingly, having a reasonably large number of accidents to review has allowed us to identify troublesome components or systems that increase accident risk such as fuel-related engine stoppage crashes in airplanes with multiple fuel tanks.
Then we got to the Diamond DA40. Over a production run of nearly 20 years, more than 2000 DA40s have been built and, from what we can tell, we’ll over 1000 are in the U.S. However, when we pulled up all of the NTSB reports of DA40 accidents, we found 51. That number included such events as a pilot who improperly set the parking brake and coasted slowly into the side of a hangar while he was looking down, thinking the airplane was parked, and damage to one brake when a DA40 hit a coyote on a night landing. Those were two of several reports on events that involved so little damage that they didn’t meet the threshold to be called an accident under the NTSB regs.