SEA04LA001 · Cessna 340
Cessna 340 · Accident: hard landing
From Roche Harbor Seaplane Base (W39) to Blakely Island Airport (38WA)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA04LA001
- 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 340
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 340
- 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
- N2695S
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Roche Harbor Seaplane Base (W39), Roche Harbor, WATo Blakely Island Airport (38WA), Blakely Island, WA
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 › Compensation for wind conditions, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Descent, excessive
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
When the pilot took off from Roche Harbor, the ceiling was about 700 feet above the ground (AGL), and remained so along his route. When he got to Blakely Island, he found the area near the north end of the runway was covered with low-level stratus clouds. Although he desired to land on runway 19, since the clouds were near the north end of the runway, he elected to proceed to the south end of the airport and land to the north. While on short final for runway 01, the aircraft encountered an area of downdrafts. Although the pilot added power and tried to adjust the sink rate, his remedial actions were insufficient to keep the aircraft from landing very hard just off the end of the paved surface. When the aircraft contacted the terrain, the landing gear collapsed, the wings were bent upwards, and the aircraft slid onto the paved runway surface and ultimately came to a stop. According to the pilot, there did not seem to be any problems with the aircraft's engines or flight control systems. The pilot further stated that because of the known turbulent air and downdrafts off the south end of the runway, of the "several hundred" landings he has made at Blakely Island, only a few have been on runway 01.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate compensation for downdrafts on final approach resulting in an excessive descent rate on short final. Factors include downdrafts off the approach end of the selected runway, and low clouds/fog.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA04LA001
- Event ID
- 20031003X01657
- Case number
- SEA04LA001
- 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, coordinates. 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: 846166bea052e4a168b36323987724ee26b51bd4f6fce3c9f0fc8e57c5f6e8a8; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:21:11.585Z.