ANC99FA106 · Cessna 180A
Cessna 180A · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Lake Hood Seaplane Base (LHD) to CHIKUMINUK LAKE, AK
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC99FA106
- 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
- 2 · 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 180A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 180
- 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
- N8TL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Hood Seaplane Base (LHD), Anchorage, AKTo CHIKUMINUK LAKE, 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 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
- En route · 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
- Tree(s)
- 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 › Flight into known adverse weather, intentional
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot was attempting to transit a 20 mile long mountainous pass. He had delayed his flight three times the day of the accident. Pilot weather reports (PIREPS) from pilots who had flown through the pass indicated the weather deteriorated about one mile west of the accident site to 700 feet overcast ceilings and 1 mile visibility. The PIREPS described rain, mist, and winds from the east of 25 knots, gusting to 40 knots. The airplane impacted a tree on a small ridge on the side of the valley at 950 feet msl, and came to rest 380 linear feet away, at an altitude of 700 feet msl. The final flight path was on a ground track of 060 degrees magnetic, back toward the eastern entrance to the pass. The NTSB investigator-in-charge interviewed four pilots who successfully transited the pass during the time period surrounding the accident. All four indicated that at 950 feet msl, the accident airplane would have been at or into the bases of the overcast. All four also indicated they flew through the pass between 300 and 800 feet in order to maintain visual contact with the terrain. Postaccident inspection of the airplane disclosed no evidence of any preimpact mechanical anomalies.
Probable cause
The pilot's intentional visual flight into known adverse weather. Factors associated with this accident were the reported low ceilings, obscuration, high winds, and turbulence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC99FA106
- Event ID
- 20001212X19391
- Case number
- ANC99FA106
- 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: 8a5070b676f996a35a2cc0945899e0e0ed3cc0d3faeb2287194e574ef2022537; retrieved 2026-09-20T21:55:12.962Z.