FTW98LA382
1998-09-02 · MCALLEN, Texas, United States · None · 1 aircraft · Status: Completed
Airport MFE
Aircraft involved
Probable cause & findings
The pilot's inadequate compensation for the crosswind resulting in a loss of control. A factor was the crosswind.
Factual narrative
On September 2, 1998, at 1530 central daylight time, a Cessna T210M airplane, Mexican registration XA-RIM, was substantially damaged when it impacted an embankment and nosed down during the landing roll at the McAllen Miller International Airport in McAllen, Texas. The airplane was owned and operated by Milenium Air Servicios of Guadalajara, Mexico. The commercial pilot, the sole occupant of the airplane, was not injured. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed and a VFR flight plan was filed for the Title 14 CFR Part 91 personal flight from Reynosa, Mexico, to McAllen. According to the pilot's written statement, following the touchdown on runway 31, a "heavy crosswind" made him "lose control," and the airplane exited the right side of the runway. He turned the airplane to parallel the runway and attempted to stop; however, he was unable to stop before the nose wheel impacted the embankment at the edge of intersecting runway 18/36. The nose landing gear separated from the airplane, and the airplane nosed down, slid across runway 18/36 and came to rest in the grass. According to the pilot, the wind was from 010 degrees at 7 knots gusting to 15 knots. At 1553, the reported winds at the airport were from 020 degrees at 11 knots. A mechanic employed by McCreery Aviation Company, a fixed-base operator (FBO) on the airport, examined the airplane and reported that the firewall, propeller, engine, and nose landing gear were damaged. During the landing roll on runway 31 with a right crosswind, the commercial pilot lost control of the airplane, and it exited the right side of the runway. The pilot turned the airplane to parallel the runway and attempted to stop; however, he was unable to stop before the nose wheel impacted the embankment at the edge of intersecting runway 18/36. The nose landing gear separated from the airplane, and the airplane nosed down, slid across runway 18/36 and came to rest in the grass. According to the pilot, the wind was from 010 degrees at 7 knots gusting to 15 knots. At 1553, the reported winds at the airport were from 020 degrees at 11 knots. Source: NTSB Aviation Accident Database (Pre-2008 Archive) Retrieved: 2026-02-12
Verbatim from NTSB's published report. Source file
NTSB_1998_FTW98LA382.txt.
Findings + structured fields enriched from FAA avall.mdb.
Full investigation docket on
data.ntsb.gov ↗.
Search this event elsewhere
External sources are reported, not agency: signal that something happened, not fact about what happened.
- TallyAero Live Wire Aviation press
- NTSB CAROL Agency ↗
- NTSB Docket Agency ↗
- Aviation Safety Network Aviation press ↗
- Kathryn's Report Aviation press ↗
- Aviation Herald Aviation press ↗
- AVweb Aviation press ↗
- Pilots of America Community ↗
- Reddit /r/flying Community ↗
- FlightAware Aviation press ↗
- AOPA accident database Aviation press ↗
- Google News News ↗
- DuckDuckGo News ↗
Related research
Matched on aircraft type or causal vocabulary (loss of control). All research papers
- Embry-Riddle Scholarly Commons 2025 · Journal article (JAAER) A Scoping Review of Aviation Loss of Control Inflight Research
Loss of control – inflight (LOC-I) contributes to aircraft accidents at unacceptably high rates. Significant industry efforts and research have aimed to improve LOC-I prevention, detection, and recove…
- SKYbrary (Eurocontrol) 2024 · SKYbrary article Loss of Control In-Flight (LOC-I) — SKYbrary Knowledge Base
SKYbrary comprehensive knowledge-base entry on Loss of Control In-Flight — definitions, contributing factors, accident case studies (Air France 447, Colgan 3407), and prevention strategies.
- Semantic Scholar 2024 · Article (International Conference on Networking and Services) Risk Assessment of Loss of Control In-Flight Trajectories for Urban Air Mobility Safety
In Urban Air Mobility (UAM), maintaining a minimum separation between aircraft is a safety requirement, which becomes challenging amidst congested air traffic and off-nominal conditions, such as Loss …
- NTSB Aircraft Accident Reports 2022 · Accident report Loss of Control on Takeoff in Icing Conditions — Citation 560XL
Cessna Citation 560XL fatal takeoff icing accident, March 2018. Investigation of a Citation 560XL loss-of-control takeoff accident in icing conditions.
- Semantic Scholar 2021 · Article (Aviation) ANALYSIS OF GENERAL AVIATION FIXED-WING AIRCRAFT ACCIDENTS INVOLVING INFLIGHT LOSS OF CONTROL USING A STATE-BASED APPROACH
Inflight loss of control (LOC-I) is a significant cause of General Aviation (GA) fixed-wing aircraft accidents. The United States National Transportation Safety Board’s database provides a rich source…
- NASA NTRS 2021 · Presentation Use of Design of Experiments in Determining Neural Network Architectures for Loss of Control Detection
Abstract—We describe empirical methods for selecting a neural network architecture to implement belief state inference on generic commercial transport aircraft.