ANC95FA157 · Piper L-21A
Piper L-21A · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From an unrecorded airport to Fort Yukon Airport (FYU)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC95FA157
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Piper L-21A
- Aircraft type
- Piper L-21
- 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
- N8373H
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Fort Yukon Airport (FYU), FT. YUKON, AK
- 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 · climb to 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- 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
- Pilot in command › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The accident airplane, one of two airplanes taking part in a hunting trip, landed in a remote and mountainous region. Ten days later, the accident airplane departed the hunting camp on a return flight and headed toward a mountain pass. The second airplane remained at the hunting camp for another 8 days and then departed on a return flight. The accident airplane was reported overdue 16 days after initially landing at the hunting camp. Search personnel did not locate the accident site until the second airplane pilot returned to the area 17 days after the accident airplane departed the hunting camp. The accident site, located in the high Arctic region, was subjected to continuous low ceilings and snow. Search and rescue personnel recovered the pilot from the accident scene but investigators were unable to reach the site until 12 months later. The airplane struck rising terrain at 5,000 feet mean sea level about 700 feet below a mountain pass. The airplane contained a large amount of camping equipment, a bear hide, and a bag containing about 40 sheep skulls and horns. No evidence of any preimpact mechanical malfunction with the airplane was found.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain adequate altitude/clearance from mountainous terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC95FA157
- Event ID
- 20001207X04117
- Case number
- ANC95FA157
- 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: 244057933bda44e143486c278278cb0642ea2a589342ad69cb095c6ba3d676b7; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:39:44.641Z.