ANC95GA048 · Cessna 182Q
Cessna 182Q · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Auburn Municipal Airport (S50) to Yakima Air Terminal McAllister Field (YKM)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC95GA048
- 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
- 1 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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
- Unknown
Cessna 182Q
- 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
- N97843
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Auburn Municipal Airport (S50), Auburn, WATo Yakima Air Terminal McAllister Field (YKM), Yakima, WA
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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 · cruise
- First occurrenceThe 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
- Loss of engine power
- 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
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot, a civil air patrol (CAP) volunteer, was on a CAP flight for proficiency training and to conduct business. The VFR cross-country flight was planned over mountainous terrain. The pilot obtained a weather briefing that included information about icing conditions along the planned route. During the flight, no communication was received from the pilot other than activation of his flight plan after departing the airport. The airplane was reported overdue, but a search was hampered due to IFR conditions and snow. No transponder code was issued to the airplane, and no discrete radar data was located in stored radar data to assist in locating the airplane. By 0900 on 4/15/95, analysis of the primary target radar returns helped in locating the accident airplane. Also, only an intermittent signal was transmitted from the airplane's emergency locator transmitter (ELT). The wreckage was located 3 days later, where the airplane had crash landed on snow covered mountainous terrain. Investigation revealed the pilot initially survived the accident, but succumbed to hypothermia. He was wearing a flight suit over dress clothes, a flight jacket, and dress shoes. No survival equipment was required to be carried in the airplane. The pilot had a personal survival kit, but had left it in his vehicle at the departure airport. A note found in the wreckage indicated that the engine lost power. After recovery, the engine operated normally. The transponder switch was found in the "standby" position; inspection of the ELT revealed a faulty tuning crystal. The pilot had received training in survival skills and was a CAP survival skills instructor.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power for an undetermined reason. Factors relating to the accident were: lack of suitable terrain for a forced landing in mountains, low ambient temperatures that contributed to hypothermia, the lack of survival equipment, an erratic ELT signal due to a faulty tuning crystal, and the lack of discrete transponder data to assist in the search.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC95GA048
- Event ID
- 20001207X03205
- Case number
- ANC95GA048
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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. 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: 71d9f67098dbef7b41cba91d15b1a5dffef21114f99ee7d39eec6f772415ac4b; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:49:33.449Z.