CHI96LA089 · Cessna 210
Cessna 210 · Accident: hard landing
From 2H0 to Pittsfield Penstone Municipal Airport (PPQ)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI96LA089
- 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
- 0 · 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 210
- 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
- N9614X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 2H0To Pittsfield Penstone Municipal Airport (PPQ), Pittsfield, IL
- 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
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- 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
- 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
- Pilot in command › Flare, misjudged
- Pilot in command › Recovery from bounced landing, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that when he landed, he didn't pull the nose up, and the airplane landed on the nose wheel. The airplane bounced up. The pilot didn't get the nose up again, and the airplane landed on the nose wheel a second time and blew the tire. The pilot had difficulty steering the airplane, and it veered off the runway. The nose wheel went into soft dirt and the airplane subsequently nosed over. Later, an investigation revealed the 54 year old pilot was wearing monovision contact lenses to correct for distant vision in his right eye and near vision in his left eye. When correcting lenses were prescribed for the pilot (before the accident), his optometrist was not aware of FAA requirements concerning use of contact lenses. After the accident, the pilot flew with a flight instructor (CFI) to prepare for an FAA-directed evaluation. The CFI reported that while the pilot was using monovision (contact) lenses, he had a tendency to flare too late. During this approximate time, the pilot visited his aviation medical examiner (AME) for his annual flight physical. The AME found the pilot to be using monovision contact lenses and advised him that these were not approved for use in flight, and that he should discontinue using them for vision correction. After the pilot changed to bifocal glasses, the CFI noted a significant improvement of his landings.
Probable cause
the pilot's misjudged flare and improper recovery from a bounced landing. Factors relating to the accident were: the pilot's improper use of procedure by wearing unapproved correcting lenses, and his resultant decreased depth perception.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI96LA089
- Event ID
- 20001208X05228
- Case number
- CHI96LA089
- 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: d5d5e053c1c277f58fc8b0ff792eedfca4e9b30b4dcb7cc1caddfaa7d7c391e8; retrieved 2026-09-22T22:49:40.931Z.