NYC04FA144 · Cessna P210N
Cessna P210N · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Bishop International Airport (FNT) to Chautauqua County-Jamestown Airport (JHW)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC04FA144
- 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 P210N
- 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
- N99HW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bishop International Airport (FNT), Flint, MITo Chautauqua County-Jamestown Airport (JHW), Jameston, NY
- 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 · descent
- 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 encounter with weather
- 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
- Design stress limits of aircraft › Exceeded
- Weather condition › Turbulence, convection induced
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was conducting a cross country instrument flight rules flight. The airplane was deviating around thunderstorm activity, and was cleared to it's destination airport, when radar contact was lost. A witness reported hearing an airplane overhead; however, he could not see the airplane due to haze and clouds. He described the engine noise as "revving in a cycling pattern." Within 10 seconds, he observed an airplane exit the clouds in a nose down spiral, with one wing missing. The airplane impacted Lake Erie nose first and sank. Examination of the right wing main spar revealed fractures consistent with an overstress separation and aft and upward loading. The pilot obtained a weather briefing prior to the flight. At the time of the briefing, there were no current or forecasted thunderstorms around the pilot's destination airport. There were also no convective SIGMETs valid for the area where the accident occurred. Review of weather radar around the time of the accident revealed two very strong thunderstorm cells over the western portion of New York, along Lake Erie, moving northeast. The airplane disappeared from radar, as it transitioned through the northern edge of one of the echoes in reflectivity values near 25 dBZ or very light intensity echoes. The geo-synchronous weather satellite-12 (GOES-12) visible image depicted a large band of clouds extending over Lake Erie, and New York. Several Cumulonimbus clouds were located immediately south of the accident site.
Probable cause
The pilot's loss of aircraft control and the subsequent overstress and separation of the wing during an encounter with convection induced turbulence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC04FA144
- Event ID
- 20040707X00918
- Case number
- NYC04FA144
- 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: 0e92c0f80027a0f4874486d968aee0a9523d69965725e69b69514429f29530d0; retrieved 2026-09-20T18:26:12.911Z.