As we would expect from an airplane as slippery as a Columbia, runway mishaps and botched go-arounds are the most popular way for its pilots to make it into the NTSB wreck reports. The good news? The reports aren’t littered with Columbia augers. On the other hand, the FAA registry lists less than 700 in service, and that includes the Columbia and Cessna 400 models.
Still, our sweep of Columbia and Cessna 300/350 wrecks dating back to 2003 uncovered only eight NTSB report-making events. Two of them involved fatalities.