FTW98LA416 · Cessna 551
Cessna 551 · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Cherry Capital Airport (TVC) to Pueblo Memorial Airport (PUB)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW98LA416
- 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 551
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 551
- 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
- N59GB
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cherry Capital Airport (TVC), Traverse City, MITo Pueblo Memorial Airport (PUB)
- 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 · landing roll
- 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 on ground/water
- 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 › Directional control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Flare, delayed
- Pilot in command › Recovery from bounced landing, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot said his landing on runway 8L (10,496 ft. X 150 ft., asphalt) was normal. He pushed the nose forward and began to deploy the thrust reversers when the front of the airplane began to 'veer and then oscillate up and down.' The airplane felt 'very stiff up front as if [it] had hit something.' The airplane became airborne and touched down again, and went off the side of the runway. Control tower personnel said it appeared to them that the pilot had made a 'hard landing.' The pilot recalled that another pilot had inadvertently taxied the airplane off a runway and had become mired in mud. The incident had occurred about one year before the accident. A cable had been wrapped around the nose wheel strut by the retrieval crew and the airplane winched out of the mud. Reportedly, the steering had not been the same since that incident. A review of the airplane maintenance records revealed no entries made as a result of this excursion.
Probable cause
The pilot's delayed flare, improper recovery from a bounced landing, and failure to maintain directional control. A factor was the rough uneven terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW98LA416
- Event ID
- 20001211X11073
- Case number
- FTW98LA416
- 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: 13257f77f4e59bdb0198590376f7547a308d48e6c56b9ac576581a8c299d4ad2; retrieved 2026-09-22T16:38:40.030Z.