PenAir Cessna 208A accident
Cessna 208A · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Port Heiden Airport (PTH) to Chignik Airport (AJC)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC98LA018
- 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 208A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 208
- 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
- N9316F
- Operator
- PenAir
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Port Heiden Airport (PTH), PORT HEIDEN, AKTo Chignik Airport (AJC), CHIGNIK, 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
- En route · climb to cruise
- 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
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Stall/mush
- 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
- Pilot in command › Airspeed, inadequate
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Stall/mush, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed in visual meteorological conditions of three to four miles visibility with high ceilings. He stated the airplane encountered freezing rain about five miles south of the airport while in cruise flight at 1,200 feet msl, and rapidly accumulated ice on the airframe, wings, and windshield. The pilot said he initially changed altitude in an attempt to exit the icing conditions. Ice accumulation continued, so he elected to return. While maneuvering to land at the airport, the airplane was unable to maintain altitude at full engine power. He said that any angle of bank resulted in the onset of prestall buffet, so he decided to land on a frozen lake south of the airport. He said that the airplane did not reach the lake, 'mushed into the ground,' and during the flare/touchdown, the left wing stalled. The pilot did not have access to the official weather prior to departure. The National Weather Service contracted observer, made his observation from a location about five miles south of the official weather station at the airport. The FAA AWOS-3 was inoperative. Examination of the airplane after the accident revealed a 1/2 inch layer of clear ice covering all the upper and lower airfoil surfaces of the airplane, from leading edges to between 1/3 and 1/2 of the chords. All antennas were coated with approximately 1/2 inch of clear ice. The airplane was not equipped with ice protection equipment except for pitot heat and windshield heat.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate in-flight decision resulting in airframe ice accumulation to the extent that degraded aircraft performance and insufficient airspeed occurred followed by a stall. Contributing factors were freezing rain and icing conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC98LA018
- Event ID
- 20001211X09391
- Case number
- ANC98LA018
- 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: 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: 5f423cf86879fd55c9c4159891584ebd7f5f59df70d9badb68e5d28025cbd3c6; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:14:11.506Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N9316F; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.