SEA97FA041 · Cessna P210N
Cessna P210N · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From McCall Municipal Airport (MYL) to Boise Air Terminal/Gowen Field (BOI)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA97FA041
- 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
- 5 · 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
- Unknown
Cessna P210N
- 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
- N6425W
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From McCall Municipal Airport (MYL), McCall, IDTo Boise Air Terminal/Gowen Field (BOI), Boise, ID
- 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 · 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
- Pilot in command › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Weather information obtained by the pilot prior to departure indicated low ceilings and visibility with mountain obscurement due to clouds, precipitation and fog. Occasional moderate turbulence with moderate rime or mixed icing was also forecast. Another pilot flying in the area at the time of the accident reported observing 'very black clouds' that had a 'roll to them and moving fast.' That pilot also reported that the clouds looked 'very violent,' and stated that before he turned around to find another route, he was experiencing light to moderate turbulence, but was not picking up any ice below the cloud base. Radar data indicates that after departure the flight headed in a westerly direction. The radar indicates that the airplane made a left turn approximately 180 degrees and was experiencing rapid increasing and decreasing altitude changes before the airplane descended rapidly and dropped from radar coverage. The wreckage was located in mountainous terrain. Evidence indicates that the airplane collided with the terrain in a steep nose down attitude.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to maintain control of the aircraft. Flight into adverse weather and turbulence were factors.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA97FA041
- Event ID
- 20001208X07354
- Case number
- SEA97FA041
- 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: 53822e4ba5268098f293ce33f319c807ab6dd16b2a8893df5691c657e36d2f7c; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:04:15.077Z.