ANC05CA122 · Piper PA-12
Piper PA-12 · Accident: overrun during landing
From Galbraith Lake Airport (GBH) to Arctic Village, AK
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC05CA122
- 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-12
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-12
- 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
- N78481
- Operator
- Joseph P. Pientka · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Galbraith Lake Airport (GBH), Galbraith Lake, AKTo Arctic Village, 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 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
- Overrun
- 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 › Weather evaluation, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport certificated pilot reported that he prepared a remote landing area by cutting brush to form an airstrip. The dirt and rock surface area was oriented east/west, and was about 900 feet long, and about 40 feet wide. He tied wind-indication streamers at both ends of the landing area. He made one successful takeoff and landing, and then picked up a passenger and returned to the landing area. During the accident landing, he landed toward the east, but the landing roll was faster than normal. He stated that as the airplane reached the end of the landing area, he applied heavy braking, and the airplane nosed over. It received structural damage to the left wing, the vertical stabilizer, and the right wing lift struts. Following the accident, the pilot reported that he saw his wind-indicating flagging switch direction 180 degrees.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate evaluation of the weather conditions, which resulted in an overrun and subsequent nose over during the landing roll. A factor contributing to the accident was a tailwind.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC05CA122
- Event ID
- 20050907X01406
- Case number
- ANC05CA122
- 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. 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: 67b6d5e94cafaeebec3452ee25d20660c62eb66bafd1b6324e1c124e5c9e0993; retrieved 2026-09-22T05:30:26.663Z.