SEA95FA095 · Cessna T210L
Cessna T210L · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From Provo Municipal Airport (PVU) to Visalia Municipal Airport (VIS)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA95FA095
- 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
- 6 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna T210L
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- 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
- N2115S
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Provo Municipal Airport (PVU), Provo, UTTo Visalia Municipal Airport (VIS), Visalia, CA
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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 · climb to cruise
- First occurrenceThe 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 control in flight
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Airframe › Ice
- Pilot in command › Flight into known adverse weather, continued
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot had received a weather briefing which included an AIRMET referencing occasional moderate rime ice or mixed icing in clouds in precipitation between 9,000 and 20,000 feet. The aircraft, which was not equipped with anti-ice/deice equipment, departed Provo at approx 1544. At 1607, the pilot radioed that he was picking up ice. At 1647 he stated that he wanted to deviate due to weather. At 1657 and again at 1702 he radioed that he was picking up ice. The controller recommended a course reversal following the 1702 call and the pilot responded 'we're doing that.' The aircraft's radar track, combined with satellite imagery of cloud activity near the time of the accident, showed the aircraft penetrating the core of a convective buildup just prior to the accident. Freezing level was near 8,000 feet and the temperature/dew point spread between 8,000 and 13,000 feet was approx 1 degree C. The aircraft impacted the ground upright in a nose low, wings level attitude.
Probable cause
the pilot's continued flight into known adverse weather (icing conditions), and his delay in executing a course reversal to exit those conditions, which resulted in airframe ice accumulation and loss of control. A factor was the icing conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA95FA095
- Event ID
- 20001207X03554
- Case number
- SEA95FA095
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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. 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: c6160e7d55c043f5da1a548e9a76e260877b9165612a9869eef0231499bb1433; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:47:18.276Z.