CHI00FA171 · Cessna 210J
Cessna 210J · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Mason City Municipal Airport (MCW) to Dubuque Regional Airport (DBQ)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI00FA171
- 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
- 1 · 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna 210J
- 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
- N3396S
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Mason City Municipal Airport (MCW), Mason City, IATo Dubuque Regional Airport (DBQ), Dubuque, IA
- 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 › Flight into adverse weather, encountered
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was destroyed on impact with a bean field during a cross-country flight. The pilot was not instrument rated. Weather radar indicated that an area of convective activity was present at the time of the accident. A witness reported hearing a low flying plane during a heavy downpour. Examination of the wreckage revealed no anomalies.
Probable cause
failure of the pilot to maintain clearance with the terrain after flight into adverse weather. Contributing factors were the thunderstorms and lack of instrument certification by the pilot.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI00FA171
- Event ID
- 20001212X21167
- Case number
- CHI00FA171
- 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: 16963e75777a5f1d07f153c68bdb5a67020930cb329c8140fd3148e7c2d82dd5; retrieved 2026-09-20T21:07:05.630Z.