ANC00LA112 · Piper PA-18
Piper PA-18 · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From an unrecorded airport to Merrill Field (MRI)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC00LA112
- 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
- N10572
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Merrill Field (MRI), Anchorage, 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
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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 › Ice/frost removal from aircraft, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Stall, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot told the NTSB investigator during a telephone interview on September 2, that during his preflight he noted frost on the wings and tail section of the airplane. He described removing the frost with a rope, and he believed he had adequately cleaned the lifting surfaces. The pilot said the airplane climbed to between five and ten feet above the off airport gravel bar, and then the right wing stalled. He said the right wing struck the ground and the airplane cartwheeled. The pilot said he believed frost on the airplane's wings caused the stall. The pilot wrote in his NTSB pilot/operator report on September 10, that the winds were gusty at the time of the accident. He wrote that as soon as the airplane lifted off, a gust 'caught the aircraft and forced the right wing down.' The airplane sustained substantial damage to the right wing, tail assembly, and empennage.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate removal of frost from the airplane, and the inadvertent stall during takeoff. A factor was wind gusts.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC00LA112
- Event ID
- 20001212X21883
- Case number
- ANC00LA112
- 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: 91779f58f013d860e714890fbd4adb8a9665bade4a926149a7c5948e75da65f0; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:29:35.948Z.