CHI02LA251 · Cessna 210L
Cessna 210L · Accident: wheels up landing
From Aurora Municipal Airport (ARR) to Mount Hawley Auxiliary Airport (3MY)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI02LA251
- 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 210L
- 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
- N3UF
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Aurora Municipal Airport (ARR), Sugar Grove, ILTo Mount Hawley Auxiliary Airport (3MY), Peoria, IL
- 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
- 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
- Wheels up 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 › Flight to new destination, not selected
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, improper
- Pilot in command › Precautionary landing, intentional
- Pilot in command › Wheels up landing, intentional
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane sustained substantial damage during a precautionary landing. The pilot reported that while descending from cruise altitude he "noticed that the autopilot descend button had gotten progressively warmer. " The pilot stated he "turned off the autopilot and noticed that the panel around the autopilot was also very hot." The pilot reported he, "turned off the master switch thinking I may have the beginning of an electrical fire and started thinking of landing at the nearest airport. Within about a minute I smelled something hot or burning and I immediately picked out a field in which to land. I did not notice any smoke." The pilot reported he made the decision to perform the precautionary landing between 2,500 - 3,000 feet msl. The pilot performed the precautionary landing with the landing gear in the fully retracted position. The airplane was located in a cornfield that was approximately 4 nautical miles northeast of the nearest airport, which had two hard surfaced runways. There was no evidence of fire and/or smoke damage to the accident airplane. No discrepancies were identified with the autopilot unit and/or system.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper in-flight decision to perform an intentional gear-up precautionary landing instead of continuing to the next available airport. A factor to the accident was the corn crop.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI02LA251
- Event ID
- 20020823X01449
- Case number
- CHI02LA251
- 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, coordinates. 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: da62cf973a6eadd35ce6fb4f2fc09bc1fcf2266f25d293efdbf4bec51bc05190; retrieved 2026-09-22T10:32:54.834Z.