CEN21LA055 · Cessna 182R
Cessna 182R · Accident: collision with terrain/object (non-CFIT) on approach
From Abilene Regional Airport (KABI) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN21LA055
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 182R
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N7306H
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Abilene Regional Airport (KABI), Abilene, TXTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 39 years (built 1981)
- 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
- Approach · VFR go-around
- 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
- Collision with terrain/object (non-CFIT)
- 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
- Wire
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was on approach to the destination airport and elected to land on runway 35, which was the opposite direction of other aircraft in the traffic pattern. A pilot in the traffic pattern reported that he made radio transmissions to the accident pilot to inform him that runway 17 was in use, but the accident pilot did not respond.
Multiple surveillance cameras captured the accident sequence and showed that the airplane did not touch down on the runway until about one-half way down the usable runway area. After the airplane touched down and passed the segmented circle, smoke from the main landing gear wheels could briefly be seen. Immediately afterward, the airplane overran the departure end of the runway and descended toward lower terrain before the airplane ascended slightly and impacted power lines that were located about 440 ft north of the departure end of the runway. The airplane impacted the ground in a right-wing-low attitude and sustained substantial damage to both wings and the fuselage.
A postaccident inspection of the automated weather observing system revealed that a missing mounting screw allowed the crossarm to be misaligned at some point before the accident. As a result, the wind was reported as 30° to 40° to the west of the actual wind direction at the time of the accident flight. This misalignment resulted in the airplane landing with a slight tailwind as opposed to the headwind the pilot was expecting based upon the reported wind condition.
Probable cause
The pilot’s decision to continue an unstabilized approach and his delayed go-around decision, which resulted in the airplane’s impact with power lines and the ground. Contributing to the accident was the inaccurate wind direction reporting as a result of a misaligned crossarm on the weather reporting station.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN21LA055
- Event ID
- 20201112102275
- Case number
- CEN21LA055
- 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, cause areas. 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: 243ed40edaa3f1733460fda6eb35841a832983e161c22de24b59f3dbbf02976f; retrieved 2026-09-15T07:22:27.134Z.