SEA04LA034 · Cessna 185F
Cessna 185F · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Deer Park Airport (DEW) to Deer Park Airport (DEW)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA04LA034
- 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 185F
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 185
- 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
- N185WB
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Deer Park Airport (DEW), Deer Park, WATo Deer Park Airport (DEW), Deer Park, 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 · 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
- Loss of control on ground/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
- Dual student › Directional control, not maintained
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Remedial action, not performed
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The left seat dual student was receiving instruction from the right seat instructor pilot to refresh his tailwheel skills. After making a wheel landing in calm winds and the tail settling, the aircraft swerved to the left. The dual student made a correction to stabilize the aircraft, but it then began to swerve to the right, which the student could not correct with full left rudder. The airplane subsequently departed the right side of the runway, impacted an 18 inch snow berm, and nosed over coming to rest inverted. The student indicated the instructor pilot did not take any action to aid him in recovering from the loss of control. Prior to the flight the student mentioned to the instructor that he did not feel comfortable with the airplane. The student had received 3.7 hours of dual instruction in the airplane prior to the accident.
Probable cause
The dual student pilot's failure to maintain directional control during the landing roll and the failure of the flight instructor to provide remedial action. A factor was snowbank.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA04LA034
- Event ID
- 20040123X00100
- Case number
- SEA04LA034
- 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: aa1b07fdb9f2cf07ae6b30fd4b3c954888853dc3b58828cfbf955b452e72b835; retrieved 2026-09-22T08:01:35.170Z.