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DEN02LA093 · Cessna 310N

9 Aug 2002 · Grand Junction, CO, United States

Cessna 310N · Accident: hard landing

From Pueblo Memorial Airport (PUB) to Sumers Airpark (GWS)

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Event

NTSB case
DEN02LA093
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
Unknown
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 310N

Aircraft type
Cessna 310
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
N111KC
Operator
Unknown
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Pueblo Memorial Airport (PUB), Pueblo, COTo Sumers Airpark (GWS), Glenwood Springs, CO
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
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

  • Dual student › Aircraft control, inadequate

Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

According to the instructor, the pilot receiving instruction made a hard landing. The instructor took the controls and initiated a go-around. Suspecting landing gear damage, he kept the landing gear extended and diverted to a nearby airport. On the approach, the right main landing gear fell off the aircraft. Because of the limited emergency equipment at the second airport, he was advised to divert to a third airport. While keeping the landing gear extended, they made a low pass over the runway, and witnesses confirmed the missing right main landing gear. The instructor retracted the landing gear and made an intentional gear-up landing. The airplane sustained extensive damage to the lower fuselage skin and bulkheads and substantial damage to the right main landing gear attachment point.

Probable cause

The dual student's inadequate aircraft control resulting in a hard landing. Contributing factors include, the dual student's inadequate airspeed and high flare, the inadequate supervision by the instructor, the in-flight separation of the right main landing gear and the intentional wheels-up landing.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record DEN02LA093
Event ID
20020816X01407
Case number
DEN02LA093
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: 37d3849e534d9005d6a41fe9226a2776e218a932d50c279915dca7c4d313f5d1; retrieved 2026-09-22T10:33:13.546Z.