ANC99LA118 · Cessna 206
Cessna 206 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From GALBRAITH LAKE, AK to Bettles Airport (PABT)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC99LA118
- 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
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna 206
- 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
- N5446X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From GALBRAITH LAKE, AKTo Bettles Airport (PABT), BETTLES, 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 · 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
- 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 › Became lost/disoriented
- Pilot in command › Flight into adverse weather, continued
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private certificated pilot departed from a remote lake, elevation 2,500 feet msl, after a week of hunting and camping. After departure, the pilot proceeded south along a river drainage. The pilot said a light rain was falling at the time, and he was orienting his position by pilotage, using a sectional map, and a topographic map. He said he became disoriented to his exact position, and turned into a small valley that was about five miles north of where he thought he was. The terrain was rising and he began climbing through 4,300 feet msl. Rain began to fall harder and the valley became too narrow to turn around. Clouds began to close around the airplane as he climbed to 5,300 feet msl. The terrain continued to rise, and the pilot noticed his airspeed was decreasing until the stall horn sounded. The airplane collided with rising, open terrain, and the floats were sheared off the airframe. The airplane received damage to the wings, propeller, and fuselage.
Probable cause
The pilot's continued flight into adverse weather conditions after becoming lost/disoriented. Factors in the accident were rising terrain, a blind/box canyon, and weather conditions consisting of clouds, rain, and fog.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC99LA118
- Event ID
- 20001212X19405
- Case number
- ANC99LA118
- 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: a57311deb8d05aa4b5ec9b892252e9e91454048f3b2b06a6fad051fd2393628d; retrieved 2026-09-22T14:15:46.159Z.