Star West Aviation Cessna 340 accident
Cessna 340 · Accident: hard landing
From Southwest Wyoming Regional Airport (RKS) to Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (BJC)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN00LA177
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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 340
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 340
- 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
- N388SP
- Operator
- Star West Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Southwest Wyoming Regional Airport (RKS), Rock Springs, WYTo Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (BJC)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 › Design stress limits of aircraft, exceeded
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
At the completion of an on-demand air taxi flight carrying four passengers, a ILS approach was conducted followed by a hard landing which damaged the landing gear, both wings, and the tips of the left propeller blades. Lighting conditions were dark night. Weather during the approach/landing was 200-foot obscuration, 1/2-mile visibility in freezing drizzle and mist. The wind was from 360 degrees magnetic heading at 10 knots and the altimeter was 30.03 inches of mercury. The recorded temperature and dew point were both 34 degrees Fahrenheit.
Probable cause
The pilot landing the aircraft hard exceeding the design stress limits. Factors were: Low ceiling, freezing rain, dark night, excessive descent rate, and improper glide path.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN00LA177
- Event ID
- 20001212X21960
- Case number
- DEN00LA177
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2000-09-23.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d88d590861edeb360212245b60b9f2fe736a328527f553e7685fdd19c5941d3a; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:23:59.283Z.