CHI98LA098 · Cessna 402B
Cessna 402B · Accident: in flight encounter with weather on approach
From Denison Municipal Airport (DNS) to Mason City Municipal Airport (MCW)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI98LA098
- 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 402B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 402
- 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
- N108RS
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Denison Municipal Airport (DNS), Denison, IATo Mason City Municipal Airport (MCW)
- 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
- Approach
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Miscellaneous, airframe › Ice
- Pilot in command › Flare, not attained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot said the airplane encountered freezing rain that was changing to snow as the airplane broke out of the clouds at 600-feet above ground level during an ILS approach. He said the airplane had about 3/8 to 1/2-inch of ice on its airframe. According to the pilot, the airplane touched down on its left main landing gear, as he landed at dusk with a 10-knot left quartering tailwind. He said the left main gear tire rolled off its wheel as the nose gear and right main landing gear contacted the runway. Both the right main and nose landing gear collapsed. The pilot said he landed in a slight crab at touchdown on the ice-covered runway. The pilot said the windshield was ice covered with a clear area of about 8-inches by 11-inches through which he could see.
Probable cause
the accumulation of airframe ice during flight, and failure of the pilot to attain a proper flare for landing. Factors relating to the accident were: the adverse weather (icing) condition; and the pilot's limited forward visibility, due to ice on the windshield and the light condition at dusk.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI98LA098
- Event ID
- 20001211X09530
- Case number
- CHI98LA098
- 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: 286e476761caaf004cce69fda45e0f3a462519ac8200602551d053a53630e18e; retrieved 2026-09-21T20:55:23.757Z.