DEN03FA002 · Cessna T210M
Cessna T210M · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From Billings Logan International Airport (BIL) to 49V · Erie, CO
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN03FA002
- 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
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna T210M
- 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
- N210HC
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Billings Logan International Airport (BIL), Billings, MTTo 49V · Erie, 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- 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
- Low altitude flight/maneuver › Attempted
- Pilot in command › Clearance, not maintained
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, improper
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The instrument rated pilot was on an IFR cross-country flight. During the course of the flight, he requested a "turn back on course and if you could work out a lower altitude, we'd appreciate it." He was soon cleared to "descend and maintain one seven thousand (feet)." The pilot later asked the controller if he could "work us out of one seven thousand (feet), down to one three thousand (feet) or one one thousand (feet)." The controller cleared the pilot to descend to 13,000 feet. The pilot acknowledged the clearance and remarked, "see if we can work our way through these clouds." Later, the pilot reported, "Got a pretty big opening. I'm gonna cancel out on this IFR. I think I can make a big circle and get under this scattered layer, if that's okay with you." The controller approved the pilot's request to cancel his IFR flight plan. The airplane was in a circling descent before radar contact was lost. The wreckage was located about 45 miles from the last radar contact. According to the pilot's logbook, he had accrued 37.3 and 82.0 hours in actual and simulated instrument meteorological conditions, respectively. According to the pilot's son, his father would file an IFR flight plan and fly in the IFR "system" to stay current with IFR procedures and controller phraseology but, as a rule, he avoided flying in actual instrument meteorological conditions.
Probable cause
the pilot's improper inflight planning/decision, and his failure to maintain terrain clearance while attempting a low altitude maneuver. Contributing factors were the mountainous terrain, the airplane’s low altitude, and the pilot's lack of total instrument time.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN03FA002
- Event ID
- 20021008X05294
- Case number
- DEN03FA002
- 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: a0004530ab0ef871de7f685b850249ca5a91283e56eb74a3443ada4a0304c6c6; retrieved 2026-09-20T19:44:53.120Z.