CHI06CA044 · Mendenhall Lancair 235
Mendenhall Lancair 235 · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From Cobb County International Airport-McCollum Field (RYY) to Medina Municipal Airport (1G5)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI06CA044
- 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
Mendenhall Lancair 235
- Aircraft type
- Mendenhall LANCAIR 235
- 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
- N290DM
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cobb County International Airport-McCollum Field (RYY), Atlanta, GATo Medina Municipal Airport (1G5), Medina, OH
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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 › Directional control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the landing roll the airplane impacted a snow bank situated alongside the runway and subsequently nosed over. The pilot reported that the runway was contaminated with snow and ice patches. The pilot stated that after touchdown the airplane "immediately began drifting toward the left side of the runway." The pilot reported that he attempted to correct for the drift using right rudder but "lost directional control" and departed off the left side of the runway. The pilot reported that he had 11 hours of flight experience in the airplane and the "runway conditions were much more than I was capable of handling with this aircraft." The accident airplane was equipped with a free-castering nose landing gear and directional control is maintained by differential braking when the rudder becomes ineffective at lower speeds.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain directional control during landing due to an icy runway. Factors to the accident were the ice/snow contaminated runway surface, snow bank, and the pilot's lack of familiarity with the accident airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI06CA044
- Event ID
- 20060113X00072
- Case number
- CHI06CA044
- 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: 58f8a33ae6d13891531c6283a1276a8b9264876e7727f8f2ccf8600417e8cacd; retrieved 2026-09-22T05:12:14.112Z.