Alaska Air Taxi Cessna U206E accident
Cessna U206E · Accident: hard landing
From Lake Hood Airport (Z41) to Haggards Landing Seaplane Base (AK48)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC97LA138
- 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 U206E
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 206
- 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
- N9129M
- Operator
- Alaska Air Taxi
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Hood Airport (Z41), LAKE HOOD STRIP, AKTo Haggards Landing Seaplane Base (AK48), TATITNA, 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
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 › Flare, improper
- Pilot in command › Recovery from bounced landing, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane landed hard and bounced into the air. During the subsequent touchdown, the nose wheel separated, and the airplane nosed over onto its back. Metallurgical examination of the nose wheel strut and forks revealed overstress fractures. The cargo was not secured, and struck the back seat passenger during the nose over. The aft passenger sustained serious neck injuries. The cargo was loaded on top of the aft seatbelts, making them unavailable to the aft passenger. The front seat, pilot-rated, passenger did not use the available lap belt or shoulder harness.
Probable cause
the pilot's improper flare and improper recovery from a bounced landing, which resulted in overload failure of the nose gear and a nose over. Factors associated with the accident were: the pilot's failure to follow procedures and directives by neglecting to tie down and secure the load, and his failure to ensure that the passengers had seatbelts available and utilized them.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC97LA138
- Event ID
- 20001208X08763
- Case number
- ANC97LA138
- 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 1997-09-02.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 7047ba12dfe508b23747e5007f7bc01ef39688ad12d1c64c40cbf0f0b5867b38; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:24:21.381Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N9129M; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.