ANC03LA065 · Cessna 402B
Cessna 402B · Accident: on ground/water collision with terrain/water during landing
From Minchumina Airport (MHM) to Fairbanks International Airport (FAI)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC03LA065
- 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 402B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 402
- 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
- N710WS
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Minchumina Airport (MHM), Minchumina, AKTo Fairbanks International Airport (FAI), Fairbanks, 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
- 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
- On ground/water 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 › Unsuitable terrain or takeoff/landing/taxi area, selected
Not plotted · Location withheld: coordinates are missing, conflicting, invalid, or have no accepted acquisition method. No substitute location has been invented.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot was landing a tricycle gear airplane on a remote, gravel and dirt airstrip. During the landing roll, the nose wheel landing gear encountered soft terrain, and the nose landing gear collapsed, resulting in structural damage to the fuselage. The pilot reported that the landing surface was softer than he had anticipated. The FAA Alaska Supplement and Airport Directory, contains the following information for the airstrip: Airport Remarks---Unattended. Runway conditions not monitored, recommend visual inspection prior to landing. Runway 02-20 is soft in spring, surface irregular and rutted.
Probable cause
The pilot's selection of an unsuitable landing site, which resulted in the collapse of the nose landing gear. A factor in the accident was a soft runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC03LA065
- Event ID
- 20030702X01003
- Case number
- ANC03LA065
- 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: 2a335b423866dcc8162854f1923abbf3ae908970b501fff9c58ba1aee3949eca; retrieved 2026-09-22T09:10:40.083Z.