SEA01LA006 · Cessna 185F
Cessna 185F · Accident: nose over during landing
From Rexburg Madison County Airport (RXE) to U59
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA01LA006
- 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
Cessna 185F
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 185
- 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
- N93981
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Rexburg Madison County Airport (RXE), Rexburg, IDTo U59
- 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
- Landing · landing roll
- 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
- Nose over
- 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 › Directional control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot landed in calm wind conditions, and the initial part of the landing roll was uneventful. But as the aircraft began to decelerate, it started to drift toward the side of the runway. As the pilot began to apply corrective actions, the soles of his boots caught on either the rudder pedals or each other. He was therefore temporarily unable to make corrective rudder inputs, and by the time he was able to free his feet, the aircraft had entered a ground loop from which he was unable to recover. As the aircraft continued its ground loop, it departed the side of the runway, encountered soft terrain and nosed over.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain directional control. Factors include soft terrain adjacent to the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA01LA006
- Event ID
- 20001212X22253
- Case number
- SEA01LA006
- 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: 16c26e1f31529994c9eb549195525a53e5c86b6cca6ce02c815943e09c70e2cc; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:22:32.418Z.