We consider a subsonic flow–structure interaction describing the flow of gas above a flexible plate. A perturbed wave equation describes the flow, and a second‐order nonlinear plate equation describes the plate's displacement. We consider the model that accounts for rotational inertia in the plate, parametrized by γ ≥ 0. It is known that the presence of γ > 0 has strong effect on regularity properties of the plate, which then allows one to establish well‐posedness of finite energy solutions for the entire structure. In this paper, it is shown that semigroup well‐posedness of the model is not only preserved for all γ ≥ 0 but that the corresponding nonlinear semigroups Sγ(t) converge to S0(t) when γ → 0. The above result holds also in the presence of nonlinear boundary damping. In addition, we provide a discussion of the regularity of strong solutions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.