ANC97FAMS1 · Cessna 182F
Cessna 182F · Accident: missing aircraft
From Merrill Field (MRI) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC97FAMS1
- 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
- 4 · 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
Cessna 182F
- 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
- N3186U
- Operator
- Monte O. Parrish · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Merrill Field (MRI), Anchorage, AKTo 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
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
- Missing aircraft
- 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
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot and 3 passengers departed on a personal sight-seeing flight around Mt. McKinley and did not return. An aerial search failed to locate the airplane, and it is presumed to have crashed in remote mountainous terrain. A flight plan was not filed. Radar track data was located from an aircraft that progressed from the area of the departure airport toward Mt. McKinley. It is unknown if the radar track was the accident airplane, but no other radar data matching the anticipated flight profile was located. The radar track terminated at an elevation of 14,400 feet mean sea level in the area of the East Buttress of Mt. McKinley. The search for the airplane was suspended 8 days after the airplane departed, and after 528 hours of search flight activity. Search personnel determined the search clues, and radar track profile, were consistent with the most likely flight profile of the accident airplane. Aircraft damage and injuries are presumed.
Probable cause
Undetermined.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC97FAMS1
- Event ID
- 20001208X08038
- Case number
- ANC97FAMS1
- 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: 5b52bd763b3c7047a10236f651a1014e87a6dc60850f3ceb317ca9175a0e714a; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:54:47.189Z.