ANC00LA100 · Piper PA-18
Piper PA-18 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather while maneuvering
From GRAVEL BAR, AK to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC00LA100
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-18
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-18
- 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
- N82962
- Operator
- Rex W. Maurer · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From GRAVEL BAR, AKTo not recorded
- 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
- Maneuvering · turn to reverse direction
- 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
- 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 › Compensation for wind conditions, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Stall, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed another hunting camp, about two miles south of the accident site, about five minutes prior to the accident. The pilot said that he flew low across the intended landing site, pulled up and began his turn to return to land. He said that some flags tied to brush alongside the landing site were blowing in wind, and others were hanging limp. He said that during his low pass the airplane encountered a large gain, then loss, of airspeed. He said that as he made his turn, the airplane quit flying and one wing dropped. He described lowering the nose to attempt to increase airspeed, then pulling up just prior to contacting the ground. According to the pilot and witnesses, after the accident, dust devils were visible in the area. The pilot was wearing a helmet, and was restrained by both lap belt and shoulder harnesses. He sustained compressive fractures of the spine, but no head injuries. His helmet was split open, and the forward-left cockpit tube cluster and instrument panel were dented.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate compensation for wind conditions, resulting in an inadvertent stall. A factor in the accident was the gusty winds.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC00LA100
- Event ID
- 20001212X21632
- Case number
- ANC00LA100
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2000-08-15.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 308fca421afdbfc1af1e7ac506ebb6fb16a7326337455857ed51a88089a6985b; retrieved 2026-09-21T10:30:17.178Z.