WPR16LA073 · Cessna T206H
Cessna T206H · Accident: hard landing
From Red Reflet Ranch Airport (WY00) to Billings Logan International Airport (BIL)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR16LA073
- 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 T206H
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 206
- 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
- N562H
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Red Reflet Ranch Airport (WY00), Ten Sleep, WYTo Billings Logan International Airport (BIL), Billings, MT
- Aircraft age
- About 11 years (built 2005)
- 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
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot reported that, just after landing, the airplane began to veer left and exited the side of the runway. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the nose landing gear fork and the right main landing gear strut were fractured in a manner consistent with overload. Examination of the damage to the airplane revealed that the main landing gear attachment points sustained upward crushing and the tail was bent downward; damage consistent with a hard landing. Control continuity was established, and no anomalies were revealed that would have precluded normal operation.
Recorded wind information for the time of the accident indicated a 50- to 60-degree crosswind at 8 knots with gusts to 19 knots for the selected runway. Shortly before the airplane landed, a general wind shear warning was broadcast on the airport's tower control frequency. Wind shear was present in the area at altitudes below 2,000 ft above ground level (agl), and review of weather information valid at the time of the accident indicated several areas of clear air turbulence extending from the surface through 14,000 ft agl. Given the damage to the airplane, the surface wind profile, and upper level winds over the terrain, the accident flight likely encountered gusting wind conditions and low-level wind shear while landing. The airplane landed hard, damaging the landing gear, which resulted in the pilot's subsequent inability to maintain directional control.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to attain a proper flare during landing in gusting wind conditions and low-level wind shear, which resulted in a hard landing and a subsequent loss of directional control.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR16LA073
- Event ID
- 20160221X22339
- Case number
- WPR16LA073
- 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: 4b5a1759eb9f4afeff3af4e4f998ea3d61948372bcf6468213ca99ac3f895bba; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:10:15.379Z.