DEN00FA104 · Cessna P206
Cessna P206 · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From Gunnison Crested Butte Regional Airport (GUC) to Oakley Municipal Airport (OEL)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN00FA104
- 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 P206
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 206
- 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
- N2577X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gunnison Crested Butte Regional Airport (GUC), Gunnison, COTo Oakley Municipal Airport (OEL), Oakley, KS
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Two witnesses saw the airplane pitch up and enter a steep left turn, then roll over and enter a descending spiral. It reappeared from behind a mountain ridge, entered another tight left run, rolled over, and disappeared behind the mountain again. The witnesses said that although the airplane was in close proximity to 'black thunderstorms clouds' to the north, it was in an area 'free of clouds.' They heard no thunder and saw no lightning. WSR-88D doppler weather radar detected 'weak weather echoes' in the vicinity of the accident site between 1413:52 and 1418:54. These echoes were moving from northwest to southeast with maximum tops near 33,000 feet. Satellite photos showed cloud cover in the area of the accident site and very cold radiative temperatures (high cloud tops). . .about 29,000 feet.' The airplane struck a large rock, head on, at the 8,166-foot level in mountainous terrain. All off the airplane was accounted for. A 15 inch blade stub was all that remained of the propeller assembly. It was twisted, curled, and bore leading edge gouges and chordwise scratches on the cambered surface.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control. A factor was a thunderstorm.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN00FA104
- Event ID
- 20001212X21199
- Case number
- DEN00FA104
- 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: 0514ada4b69c9f8b34b3bdf6a8266dfc59c705a884627f1de5e7e263ed1a4bfa; retrieved 2026-09-20T21:10:33.586Z.