SEA95FA079 · Cessna 182P
Cessna 182P · Accident: partial loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Lake Chelan Airport (S10) to Seattle Paine Field International Airport (PAE)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA95FA079
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna 182P
- 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
- N182AL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Chelan Airport (S10), Chelan, WATo Seattle Paine Field International Airport (PAE), Everett, 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
- Partial loss of engine power (non-mechanical)
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Fuel system, carburetor › Ice
- Pilot in command › Carburetor heat, improper use of
- Pilot in command › Flight into known adverse weather, continued
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While en route, the pilot advised ATC that he was picking up carburetor ice, did not seem able to get rid of it, and could not maintain his assigned altitude of 14,000 feet. He was cleared to 10,000 feet, and about 2 minutes later reported that he had virtually no power left and could not maintain 10,000 feet. He was advised that he was in 10,000-foot terrain. In response to an ATC query, the pilot reported that he was trying the carburetor heat but when he applied it the engine lost what little power it was producing. The airplane subsequently impacted steep snow-covered terrain about 100 feet below the top of a rock ridge. The pilot had earlier reported that he was picking up a trace of rime ice. During his weather briefing, the pilot was advised that the forecast for his route included occasional moderate rime or mixed ice in clouds and precipitation between 4,000 and 12,000 feet. The briefing included the fact that a moist unstable air mass, with cloud tops to 20,000 feet, would be approaching western Washington in the late afternoon.
Probable cause
the pilot's continued flight into known adverse weather, and his improper use of carburetor heat. Factors include: weather conditions conducive to carburetor icing and airframe icing, airframe ice, and mountainous/hilly terrain in the area of the forced descent.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA95FA079
- Event ID
- 20001207X03376
- Case number
- SEA95FA079
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1995-04-14.
- API snapshot SHA-256: c4946d2a227e7d29fdccfc04d41ed0cef9abb0cbac0be1fcbe058b57872a6db0; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:49:15.318Z.