ANC97IA089 · Cessna 185
Cessna 185 · Incident: wheels down landing in water
From Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (ANC) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC97IA089
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- 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 185
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 185
- 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
- N4952E
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (ANC)To 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
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Wheels down landing in water
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Gear retraction, not performed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot was taking a check ride with an FAA inspector for a reinstatement of his flight instructor certificate. The check ride was being conducted in the pilot's amphibian float equipped airplane. Under the direction of the FAA inspector, the pilot was demonstrating the technique for a glassy water landing. Shortly after touchdown, the airplane slowly nosed over. Both the pilot and the inspector were uninjured, and were able to quickly evacuate the airplane. The pilot related he was given different departure instructions from the air traffic control tower when he took off from a hard surface runway at the beginning of the flight, and he elected to leave his wheels extended longer than normal because of the route of flight. He said he forgot to retract them prior to the water landing. The FAA inspector indicated he also was unaware of the extended wheels. The landing gear indicator light in the airplane was functional at the time of the incident.
Probable cause
The pilot-in-command's failure to retract the landing gear which led to an inadvertent water landing with the amphibian float wheels extended. Associated factors are the pilot's habit interference and the FAA inspector's inadequate monitoring of the flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC97IA089
- Event ID
- 20001208X08039
- Case number
- ANC97IA089
- 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: e2ffa4c7de6ba4ed2339aaadb37ff77c0fea5978b2d6cba193fb16ee33770f47; retrieved 2026-09-22T19:23:51.284Z.