SEA04LA183 · Piper PA-18
Piper PA-18 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water on approach
From Blaine, WA to Blaine, WA
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA04LA183
- 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
- N2415P
- Operator
- Guy R and Tyler R Glahn
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Blaine, WATo Blaine, 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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
- In flight 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(cfi) › Emergency procedure, simulated
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Remedial action, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
As the private pilot-rated student was climbing through 400 feet above the water in the float-equipped airplane, the instructor pilot pulled the power to idle and instructed the student to execute a simulated engine-out forced landing on the waters of a bay. The student then established the aircraft in a controlled slip in order to descend to the point at which he wanted to touch down. When the aircraft was about 50 feet above the water, and still in a slip, the instructor, who had just warned the student to watch the airspeed, thought that the aircraft was about to enter a stall. In order to keep the aircraft from entering the stall, the instructor added full power and pushed forward on the control stick. The aircraft then pitched down and impacted the surface of the water in a 30 to 40 degree nose-down attitude. It was the opinion of the student that the aircraft was not about to enter a stall, but that the instructor pilot misinterpreted some light turbulence, and the wing-low attitude created by the slip, as the beginning of a stall.
Probable cause
The instructor pilot's inadequate remedial action during his student's final approach for a simulated engine out water landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA04LA183
- Event ID
- 20040914X01423
- Case number
- SEA04LA183
- 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 2004-09-05.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 6219a41f3b5ffbfa8cdb2764c0a84fbb3aa38844197cff0316012f5c29174bc9; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:08:51.728Z.