SEA07FA148 · Cessna 210-5 (205)
Cessna 210-5 (205) · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Lopez Island Airport (S31) to Madera Municipal Airport (MAE)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA07FA148
- 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
- 2 · 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 210-5 (205)
- 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
- N8308Z
- Operator
- Norma J. Ingham · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lopez Island Airport (S31), Lopez Island, WATo Madera Municipal Airport (MAE), Madera, CA
- 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 · cruise
- 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
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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 › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The non-instrument rated pilot received two weather briefings prior to departure, both of which forecasted that marginal visual weather conditions existed along the route of the flight that included mountain obscuration in clouds, mist and fog. Weather observations from reporting stations east and south of the airplane's route showed cloud bases of between 1,300 feet to 1,700 feet at about the time of the accident. Additionally, another pilot flying in the general location of the crash site reported fog and low clouds in the area of the accident site. Based on all the evidence, it is likely that the pilot continued the route of flight into instrument meteorological conditions and collided with mountainous terrain in a controlled flight attitude at an elevation of 1,959 feet, 845 feet below and 1.25 miles southeast of the 2,804 foot mountain summit. A post-accident examination of the airframe and engine failed to reveal any anomalies which would have precluded normal operation of the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot's continued flight into instrument meteorological conditions, which resulted in controlled flight into mountainous terrain. Factors contributing to the accident included the low clouds which obscured the rising, mountainous terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA07FA148
- Event ID
- 20070616X00747
- Case number
- SEA07FA148
- 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: 8fa64ab653a33636f623bd85fcdf43b3831820657b1b4e1911971573d75273a7; retrieved 2026-09-20T16:33:50.456Z.