ANC01FA012 · Piper PA-18A
Piper PA-18A · Accident: overrun during takeoff
From an unrecorded airport to Kodiak Airport (ADQ)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC01FA012
- 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
- 1 · 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-18A
- 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
- N8162C
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Kodiak Airport (ADQ), Kodiak, 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
- Takeoff · roll/run
- 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
- Overrun
- 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 › Preflight planning/preparation, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Weather evaluation, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A private certificated pilot was departing a small lake at the conclusion of a deer hunting trip. An Alaska State Trooper/Pilot was flying over the area of the lake, conducting an aerial game patrol. He saw the float-equipped accident airplane taxiing in a southwest direction from the northeast shoreline of the lake. The lake has an hourglass shape, with the narrow portion of the lake located about 1/3 of the way from the southwest end of the lake, and has shallow water at the narrowest point. The wind was blowing from the northeast about 5 to 10 knots, and 4 to 5 inch waves were building against the southwestern shore. The trooper said he expected the airplane to taxi to the southwest, and then depart toward the northeast. When the airplane did not become airborne, the trooper returned to the area of the lake. He saw the airplane resting against the southwest shore, having collided with a small bluff along the shore. The lake was too small for the trooper airplane to land, and search and rescue personnel responded in a helicopter. The lake was measured by GPS equipment and found to be 760 feet long. An on-scene examination of the airplane did not reveal any preimpact malfunction of the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight planning/preparation, and inadequate evaluation of weather conditions. Factors in the accident were a tailwind, and a short runway/landing area.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC01FA012
- Event ID
- 20001226X45469
- Case number
- ANC01FA012
- 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: c8112992531d0fa93360592056bd1897356f4e02c767ea5ede92ea055d2aae5a; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:48:12.713Z.