FTW00FA144 · Cessna 210L
Cessna 210L · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Grand Junction Regional Airport (GJT) to Vernal Regional Airport (VEL)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW00FA144
- 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
- 2 · 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 210L
- 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
- N732ER
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Grand Junction Regional Airport (GJT), Grand Junction, COTo Vernal Regional Airport (VEL), Vernal, UT
- 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
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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 › VFR flight into imc, continued
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The instrument rated pilot received 3 weather briefings and waited 3 hours for weather to improve before departing on a VFR flight. According to witnesses, the mountain tops in the vicinity of the pilot's route of flight were obscured by clouds. The pilot told the witnesses that he was concerned with the freezing level and therefore wanted to stay VFR. The pilot told the FSS weather briefer that he was trying to stay out of icing conditions and the lower he flew the better. The pilot filed a flight plan that had an intended route of flight along a victor airway at VFR altitudes. Radar data depicted the accident airplane climbing to a maximum altitude of 8,700 feet msl and heading northwest on course before radar contact was lost. The radar altitude data was overlaid on topographical data and revealed the terrain rising to meet the airplane's last radar altitude return. The airplane impacted mountainous terrain at 8,736 feet msl. Weather reports along the route of flight depict cloud bases initiating approximately 7,300 feet msl. Examination of the wreckage revealed no anomalies that would have prevented normal operation of the aircraft.
Probable cause
The pilot's continued VFR flight into instrument meteorological conditions. Factors were the mountain obscuration and the rising terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW00FA144
- Event ID
- 20001212X20987
- Case number
- FTW00FA144
- 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: a6e561d01a7303517230350963e8492b4652727a879bd1dfafc121294259f25b; retrieved 2026-09-20T21:14:48.947Z.