SEA97FA075 · Cessna T210L
Cessna T210L · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From BZM · Bozeman, MT to Ely Airport Yelland Field (ELY)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA97FA075
- 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
- 4 · 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 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
- N22219
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From BZM · Bozeman, MTTo Ely Airport Yelland Field (ELY), ELY, NV
- 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
- In flight encounter with weather
- 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 › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Flight into adverse weather, performed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane collided with terrain at high airspeed, & wreckage was distributed about 380 ft from the 1st impact mark. Weather in the area was described as broken showers & squalls. During on-scene investigation, no pre-crash mechanical discrepancy was noted. No eye-witnesses were found, but a person reported hearing an airplane in the vicinity at about the time of the accident. This witness was on top of a mountain 24 miles northwest of the accident site. He heard an airplane that he was believed was heading south. The witness observed that the weather in the vicinity was cloud covered, and the top of nearby Clark Canyon could not be seen. Also, the witness reported that the weather was very windy, with large clouds moving by all day. The visibility was reported to be good at times, but within minutes visibility could become obscured. Radar data indicated that a radar target with a VFR transponder code and no altitude encoder response was on a southwesterly heading in the vicinity, around the time of the accident. The last radar response on that target was at 1248:57, about 10 miles north of the accident site. The accident site was covered with snow that obscured distinguishing vegetation, rocks, or other characteristics on the surface.
Probable cause
flight by the pilot into adverse weather conditions, and his failure to maintaint altitude/clearance from terrain. The adverse weather condition was a related factor.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA97FA075
- Event ID
- 20001208X07625
- Case number
- SEA97FA075
- 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: 0e26fa6166579854d5ee650de798e2e1f6db650562548f0bc9a660986681972c; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:01:10.147Z.