Arctic Circle Air Service Flight 30
Cessna 208B · Accident: forced landing during initial climb
From Bethel Airport (BET) to Marshall Don Hunter Sr Airport (MLL)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC00LA017
- 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 208B
- 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
- N5187B
- Operator
- Arctic Circle Air Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bethel Airport (BET), AKTo Marshall Don Hunter Sr Airport (MLL), MARSHALL, 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
- Forced 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
- Airframe › Ice
- Pilot in command › Aircraft preflight, inadequate
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Bethel, AK, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The certificated airline transport pilot, with one, pilot-rated passenger aboard, was departing runway 36 on a scheduled commuter flight. The pilot said that about 100 feet above the runway, he retracted 10 degrees of flaps. He added that as the airplane climbed to about 200 feet above the runway, he retracted the remaining 10 degrees of flaps, and the airplane descended while rolling to the left. The pilot stated that he had to apply full right aileron to keep the airplane upright. He said full power was already applied to the engine, but the airplane continued to descend. The airplane landed on the runway, about 200 feet from the runway threshold, and continued off the end of the runway, into snow-covered terrain. The pilot stated that during his preflight inspection, he removed an accumulation of ice and snow from the wings and empennage. Due to scheduling delays, the flight did not depart until about 2 hours after the initial preflight. The pilot said that prior to departure, he did not recheck for any additional frost accumulation. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the propeller, fuselage, and wings.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight and his failure to remove snow and airframe ice from the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC00LA017
- Event ID
- 20001212X20186
- Case number
- ANC00LA017
- 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: c53b1ac3ef74e2a9bad20bb778c34bef1bd4b5fc29f74c50215c19912e184644; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:50:43.750Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N5187B; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.