ANC03LA092 · Piper PA-18
Piper PA-18 · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From Healy, AK to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC03LA092
- 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
Piper PA-18
- 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
- N4320Z
- Operator
- Max Schwab Master Guide
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Healy, 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Tree(s)
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Compensation for wind conditions, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial certificated pilot was landing a tundra tire-equipped airplane at a remote site for the purpose of transporting a hunting client to a camp. The landing area, where the pilot had landed in the past, was an area of tundra about 600 feet long and 50 feet wide. The landing area is located in a creek drainage, surrounded by mountains. The pilot indicated that as he was landing toward the south, about 3 feet above touchdown, a 20 to 30 knot gust of wind from the west blew the airplane into several willow trees. The airplane came to rest inverted, and received damage to the wings, fuselage, and empennage. The pilot reported that the wind conditions had previously been light and variable.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate compensation for wind conditions and failure to maintain aircraft control after encountering wind gusts during the landing flare/touchdown which resulted in an in-flight collision with trees and subsequent nose over. A factor contributing to the accident was the presence of gusty wind conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC03LA092
- Event ID
- 20030819X01368
- Case number
- ANC03LA092
- 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 2003-08-08.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 12270a0805388b96800772fe8610e323c12d25dc68bcbbf149201a29cb7a06f9; retrieved 2026-09-22T08:48:18.507Z.