Flight Alaska Flight 585
Cessna 207 · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Chefornak Airport (PACK) to Kipnuk Airport (PAKI)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC05LA041
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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 207
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 207
- 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
- N36CF
- Operator
- Flight Alaska
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chefornak Airport (PACK), Chefornak, AKTo Kipnuk Airport (PAKI), Kipnuk, 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Pilot in command › Directional control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial certificated pilot was landing on a snow-covered runway during night visual meteorological conditions. The pilot indicated that when the nose wheel was lowered to the runway after the main landing gear wheels touched down, the airplane suddenly veered to the left. The airplane departed the left side of the runway, and the left wing struck a snow berm. The nose gear strut was displaced when a strut side brace fractured during the accident, and the left wing received damage to the outboard rib, and leading edge of the wingtip. The pilot reported the wind condition as 140 degrees at 5 knots. The operator's director of maintenance reported that during the repair of the nose gear assembly, he found no evidence of a mechanical malfunction. The runway is 2,120 feet long and 35 feet wide, and the FAA Airport/Facility Directory, Alaska Supplement, states, in part: Unattended. Caution: Runway condition not monitored, recommend visual inspection prior to using. Caution: Frequent crosswinds.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain directional control of the airplane during the landing roll, which resulted in a departure from the runway and collision with a snow bank. A factor contributing to the accident was snow-covered terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC05LA041
- Event ID
- 20050314X00307
- Case number
- ANC05LA041
- 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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2005-02-16.
- API snapshot SHA-256: a037875b2ea644a69987edb071a8a0c5b1483893d98efcf468266181c307ebb5; retrieved 2026-09-18T15:06:15.624Z.