SEA96TA046 · Christen Industries A-1
US Department of Agriculture Christen Industries A-1 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From Lake County Airport (LKV) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA96TA046
- 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
- 0 · 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
- Government
- 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
Christen Industries A-1
- Aircraft type
- Christen A-1
- 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
- N2866B
- Operator
- US Department of Agriculture
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake County Airport (LKV), ORTo not recorded
- 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
- Public Aircraft
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The aircraft was being used on an animal control flight, and the pilot was executing a low pass over a frozen, flat, snow covered lake surface, in pursuit of a coyote. During this maneuver, the gunner's weapon jammed, and the pilot diverted his attention to the direction of the weapon's muzzle, which was pointed toward a fuel tank. Immediately thereafter, the aircraft's wheels drug in the snow covered surface, and the aircraft nosed over. An overcast existed at the time, and there was a lack of references available on the smooth, even surface of the lake to enhance the pilot's depth perception.
Probable cause
failure of the pilot to maintain altitude/clearance from the terrain (snow covered, frozen lake). Factors relating to the accident were: the pilot's attention being diverted to a perceived safety hazard, and lack of visual cues for pilot perception of clearance from the lake surface.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA96TA046
- Event ID
- 20001208X05334
- Case number
- SEA96TA046
- 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 1996-02-02.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 9b89c001908939bb838d1b4f5bf0dff34efe6206df172ff844f1119639e234bf; retrieved 2026-09-18T21:22:09.860Z.