CEN10LA032 · Cessna 210
Cessna 210 · Accident: nose over/nose down during landing
From Ulysses Airport (ULS) to Four Corners Regional Airport (FMN)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN10LA032
- 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 210
- 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
- N7464E
- Operator
- William L. Gold · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ulysses Airport (ULS), Ulysses, KSTo Four Corners Regional Airport (FMN), Farmington, NM
- 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 · landing roll
- Defining eventThe 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
- Nose over/nose down
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was in level cruise flight at 6,500 feet mean sea level when the pilot "detected a slight smoke smell." Oil pressure and oil temperature readings were normal, but he noticed the EGT (exhaust gas temperature) on one of the cylinders had dropped, followed shortly thereafter by the EGT decay of another cylinder. The pilot was forced to make an emergency landing in an open field. Recent rains had softened the ground and when the nosewheel touched down, the airplane nosed over. An FAA airworthiness inspector who examined the engine said that the cylinder hold-down studs on the lower side of the number 2 cylinder had threads, but one stud had snapped off. Further examination of the engine revealed that the lower four nuts on the number two cylinder were not properly torqued, which allowed the lower side of the cylinder to move while the upper part remained fixed. A crack developed on the right side of the cylinder and propagated along the bottom lip to the left side of the cylinder, eventually reaching the point of failure. When the annual and 100-hour inspections were done on August 21, 2009, all 6 cylinders had been removed “due to low compression” and replaced with overhauled cylinders, new pistons and rings, and new gaskets and seals. Airframe total time was 3,797.79 hours, and the time since major engine overhaul was 1,239.82 hours. The tachometer read 2960.72. At the accident site, the tachometer read 3059.41 hours.
Probable cause
A partial loss of engine power due to failure of the No. 2 cylinder as a result of the failure of the repair facility to properly torque the lower four nuts on the cylinder.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN10LA032
- Event ID
- 20091028X14509
- Case number
- CEN10LA032
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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. 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: 6bef45fd2159dc0b0d72ba370df3cdf120f267f1c37b4f5a7d796b839e4ea803; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:26:44.793Z.