SEA02LA184 · Cessna 182
Skydive Cessna 182 · Accident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From Beaver Oaks Airport (OR66) to Beaver Oaks Airport (OR66)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA02LA184
- 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
- Unknown
- 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 182
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N5337B
- Operator
- Skydive
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Beaver Oaks Airport (OR66), Estacada, ORTo Beaver Oaks Airport (OR66)
- 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
- En route · cruise
- 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
- Airframe, component or system failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Flight control, elevator › Entangled
- Flight control, rudder › Entangled
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While the aircraft was level at 10,500 feet above sea level (MSL), four skydivers took their positions on the right exterior jump-step of the aircraft. Just after the last jumper was on the step, the parachute of one of the jumpers inadvertently deployed and streamed back into the aircraft's tail surfaces. Soon thereafter, the subject jumper separated himself from the deployed parachute, jumped from the aircraft, and opened his reserve chute. At about the same time, the other three jumpers also departed the aircraft. Although the pilot attempted to control the aircraft, he found that with the parachute wrapped around the tail surfaces, the rudder and elevator did not respond to his control inputs. He therefore applied a small amount of right rudder in an attempt to separate the parachute from the aircraft, but the airplane responded by pitching nose down and entering what appeared to the pilot to be an inverted spin. At that point, the pilot also jumped from the aircraft and successfully opened his parachute, and the aircraft continued to spin inverted until it impacted the terrain.
Probable cause
The entanglement of an inadvertently opened skydiver's parachute in the aircraft’s elevator and rudder just after a group of four skydivers positioned themselves on the aircraft's external jump platform prior to a jump.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA02LA184
- Event ID
- 20021021X05346
- Case number
- SEA02LA184
- 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, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2002-09-29.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 9342c71d247acafa05b8e0e2c262416b103b93272783d4b842c9d7d9b2db16a7; retrieved 2026-09-22T10:10:11.716Z.