ANC89LA139 · Maule M-5
Maule M-5 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water during landing
From Northway Airport (ORT) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC89LA139
- 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
Maule M-5
- Aircraft type
- Maule M-5
- 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
- N5644W
- Operator
- Crostick, Arthur · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Northway Airport (ORT), NORTHWAY, 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
- Landing · aborted
- 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 collision with terrain/water
- 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 › Airspeed, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Go-around, delayed
- Pilot in command › Touchdown, inadvertent
Not plotted · Location withheld: coordinates are missing, conflicting, invalid, or have no accepted acquisition method. No substitute location has been invented.
NTSB narrative
THE PLT WAS ON A FLT TO THE NEBESNA GLACIER AREA TO GO HUNTING. HE FOUND WHAT LOOKED LIKE A CHOICE SITE TO LAND FROM WHERE HE PLANNED TO HIKE. HIS 1ST APCH TO LAND WAS LONG, SO HE MADE A GO-AROUND. HIS 2ND APCH WAS ALSO LONG, BUT THIS TIME, THE ACFT TOUCHED DOWN & THE WHEELS CAUGHT SOME LOW SHRUBS, SLOWING THE ACFT. THE PLT STATED HE 'ADDED FULL POWER FOR GO-AROUND, STRUGGLED INTO THE AIR WITH FULL FLAPS, AND TURNED TOWARD LOWER TERRAIN' WHICH WAS DOWN WIND. HE SAID THE ACFT ENCOUNTERED A DOWNDRAFT & WAS 'PUSHED' INTO A DRY RIVER BED. HE STATED THAT HE MADE A CONTROLLED LANDING ABOUT 1/2 MI FROM THE INTENDED LANDING AREA, BUT THE TERRAIN WAS TOO ROUGH & THE LANDING GEAR BROKE OFF.
Probable cause
THE PILOT ALLOWED THE AIRCRAFT TO INADVERTENTLY TOUCH DOWN, HE DELAYED MAKING A GO-AROUND, AND HE DID NOT MAINTAIN SUFFICIENT SPEED TO CONTINUE THE GO-AROUND. CONTRIBUTING FACTORS WERE: THE PILOT'S SELECTION OF UNSUITABLE TERRAIN, HIGH VEGETATION IN THE SELECTED LANDING AREA, A DOWNDRAFT, AND ROUGH TERRAIN IN THE DRY RIVER BED.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC89LA139
- Event ID
- 20001213X29002
- Case number
- ANC89LA139
- 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 1989-08-10.
- API snapshot SHA-256: bf223a4a28ae0fe9ea81cf1f26fb167143e406796f9c8e3ea2f0fd9698327e8e; retrieved 2026-09-23T07:17:03.506Z.