CEN11FA130 · Cessna 210B
Cessna 210B · Accident: controlled flight into terrain/object (CFIT) while maneuvering
From Boulder Municipal Airport (BDU) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN11FA130
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 210B
- 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
- N200EP
- Operator
- Cullum Chuck R JR · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Boulder Municipal Airport (BDU), Boulder, COTo not recorded
- 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
- 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
- Controlled flight into terrain/object (CFIT)
- 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
- Personnel issues › Miscellaneous
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane departed a local airport and maneuvered in the area of the accident site for about 1 hour 10 minutes. About 2 minutes before the accident, the pilot reported that he had "lost elevator control." Subsequently, radar data depicted the airplane maneuver about the same altitude before beginning a turn and rapidly descending to impact. Had the elevator failed, the pilot likely would not have been able to maintain altitude for the 2 minutes prior to the rapid descent. Further, examination of the wreckage did not reveal any preimpact anomalies with the flight control system or airframe, and the signatures on the engine indicated the engine was operating at a high power setting at the time of impact. The pilot's postaccident toxicology test results revealed the use of antidepressant medications. The coroner ruled that the manner of death was suicide, and the flight profile was consistent with the pilot intentionally flying the airplane into terrain.
Probable cause
The pilot's intentional flight into terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN11FA130
- Event ID
- 20101227X20119
- Case number
- CEN11FA130
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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: ea758f348539c51c136e30ce082337d42eebff40137c115a4f01ebb3983fe625; retrieved 2026-09-13T21:11:58.558Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: departure. BDU is Boulder, Colorado; record location Loveland, CO corroborates the state. 'CB' is not a valid state code.