WPR23LA342 · Cessna T210H
Cessna T210H · Accident: landing gear not configured
From Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport (STS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR23LA342
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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 T210H
- 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
- N2210R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport (STS), Santa Rosa, CATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 55 years (built 1968)
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Landing gear not configured
- 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 systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After flying about 200 miles from his home airport, the pilot performed an uneventful night landing. After taxiing to the end of the runway he decided to perform another takeoff and landing for night currency. There was no traffic in the pattern, and after takeoff he retracted the landing gear. Once at pattern altitude, he stabilized the airplane in preparation for landing on the longest runway. During the final approach he adjusted the throttle, mixture, flaps, and propeller, but missed the step to extend the landing gear. The pilot stated that during the landing he did not recall hearing the gear warning horn, although it had worked during the preflight inspection. The airplane landed gear-up about midfield down the runway and sustained substantial damage to the lower fuselage structure. Following the accident, the pilot secured the airplane by shutting off the fuel selector valve and turning off the airplane’s master switch (which also controlled its external lights). The airport served air carrier operations and was located within Class D airspace until 2000 local, one hour before the accident, when the air traffic control tower closed, and the airspace reverted to Class G (uncontrolled). About the time of the accident, an Embraer E175 air carrier flight was inbound for landing on the accident runway, but from the opposite direction. A member of the airport operations department was performing a routine wildlife runway inspection and observed the accident. He warned the inbound air carrier flight that the runway was obstructed, and the crew initiated a missed approach, and diverted to another airport. The first officer from the air carrier flight stated that he heard the accident airplane make position announcements while in the pattern, but that had it not been for the announcement by airport operations personal that the runway was obstructed, they would likely have continued the approach and landed with the unlit airplane still occupying the runway. The airport typically served about 218 air carrier flight takeoffs and landings per week during the period of the accident, 13 of which were due to operate after the control tower was closed.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to configure the landing gear during the landing approach.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR23LA342
- Event ID
- 20230913193058
- Case number
- WPR23LA342
- 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: local date, investigation status, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2023-09-06.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 9827ca00f2ba63e4bdc35cb24600ff7f567bbe8ad134d68fbf8e05cb440bbeea; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:07:08.049Z.