CEN25LA349 · Cessna 650
Aircraft Resource Center Cessna 650 · Accident: other weather encounter en route
From Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) to Airlake Airport (LVN)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN25LA349
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna 650
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 650
- 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
- N682RS
- Operator
- Aircraft Resource Center
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Harry Reid International Airport (LAS), Las Vegas, NVTo Airlake Airport (LVN), Lakeville, MN
- Aircraft age
- About 33 years (built 1992)
- 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
- En route
- 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
- Other weather encounter
- 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 › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot, who was also a flight instructor, stated that the accident flight, with a commercial pilot in the right seat receiving flight instruction, was a personal flight with one passenger aboard. While en route to the destination airport, the pilot attempted to fly over a line of convective weather. While at flight level (FL) 410 and at 0.75 Mach, the airplane encountered “heavy” turbulence and hail. The pilot descended to FL 350 and slowed the airplane to 0.68 Mach, then flew about 495 nautical miles and landed at the planned destination airport, rather than performing an immediate landing at the nearest suitable airport. The airplane sustained substantial damage to both wings, empennage, and windshield. The pilot stated that the accident could have been prevented by having diverted about 80 to 100 miles north of the weather. The pilot stated there was no mechanical malfunction/failure of the airplane that that would have precluded normal airplane operation. About three months after the accident, the damaged airplane was discovered after an anonymous complaint was made of an unreported airplane accident. The airplane was located at the airplane owner’s hangar at the destination airport where it was undergoing repairs. The airplane make and model was not certified for single pilot operations and required two pilots. The commercial pilot did not hold a type rating for the airplane make and model nor met regulatory requirements to act as second-in-command for the flight.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper judgment to circumnavigate convective activity which resulted in extensive hail damage to the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN25LA349
- Event ID
- 20250828200896
- Case number
- CEN25LA349
- 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 2025-06-14.
- API snapshot SHA-256: ca9365e9306c40dda69b329aabaa05ae07321d61bd9124995de68a2ff17af3c6; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:16:59.677Z.