NYC00FA209 · Cessna 210D
Cessna 210D · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From OFP to Linden Airport (LDJ)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC00FA209
- 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 210D
- 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
- N3894Y
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From OFPTo Linden Airport (LDJ), Linden, NJ
- 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 · climb to 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
- Pilot in command › Spatial disorientation
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot departed at night, on an instrument flight plan, in a GPS-equipped airplane. The weather conditions included low ceilings and fog. The clearance he received prior to departure differed from his filed route, and once airborne, he received a further revision. The airplane continued to climb, but the pilot did not follow the revised clearance. Twice, the radio was keyed, with no voice transmission heard. Radar data indicated that the airplane climbed to 4,300 feet, and then entered a steep, descending right turn. Several witnesses heard the airplane descending at high power. One witness saw the lights illuminated on the airplane prior to ground impact. No evidence of a pre-existing failure was found with the engine or airframe. The pilot's total flight experience was about 300 hours, with 50 hours in the accident airplane. His recency of instrument experience and night flight was not determined.
Probable cause
The failure of the pilot to maintain control of the airplane due to spatial disorientation. Factors were the dark night, low ceiling and fog.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC00FA209
- Event ID
- 20001212X21562
- Case number
- NYC00FA209
- 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: de7b9882099bd34c35dc2318331e83044253c9dc887c6fc5c9c43496d2d5ea50; retrieved 2026-09-20T21:00:20.826Z.