Yukon Aviation Cessna 207A accident
Cessna 207A · Accident: in flight encounter with weather during initial climb
From an unrecorded airport to Bethel Airport (BET)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC97LA134
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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 207A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 207
- 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
- N7318U
- Operator
- Yukon Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Bethel Airport (BET), 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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 encounter with weather
- 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 › Weather evaluation, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot and three passengers were departing a remote, private airstrip. The airstrip is 1,000 feet long and 40 feet wide, at an elevation of 1,200 feet mean sea level. It is located in a narrow canyon with steep terrain on the north side, and lower hills on the south side. During the takeoff on a magnetic heading of 130 degrees, the airplane lifted off near the end of the runway. The pilot indicated that after lift-off the airplane climbed to about 50 feet above the ground, and suddenly encountered a downdraft. The airplane began descending toward the ground, and collided with rough terrain. The pilot indicated the wind conditions at the time of the accident were 040 degrees at 20 knots, with gusts to 25 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate evaluation of the weather conditions. Factors in the accident were a downdraft, crosswind conditions, and rough/uneven terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC97LA134
- Event ID
- 20001208X08761
- Case number
- ANC97LA134
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- 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 1997-09-07.
- API snapshot SHA-256: cb7b0c05499aff72ca73e03d6820f11363130bca2556d35adf0ffb9fc7c189c2; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:23:38.311Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N7318U; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.