ANC06LA001 · Cessna 185
Cessna 185 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Aleknagik, AK to Iliamna Airport (PAIL)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC06LA001
- 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 185
- 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
- N9950X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Aleknagik, AKTo Iliamna Airport (PAIL), Iliamna, 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
- En route · cruise
- 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
- Total loss of engine power (non-mechanical)
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Fuel contamination
- 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
- Fluid, fuel › Contamination, water
- Pilot in command › Aircraft preflight, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot was conducting a 14 CFR Part 91 personal cross-country flight, when the engine lost power about 20 miles from the final destination. The pilot said the symptoms were similar to fuel starvation, but according to his calculations he should have had 30 minutes of fuel remaining. In a written statement to the NTSB, the pilot wrote that the morning following the accident, before the airplane was recovered, he "noticed a substantial amount of frost/ice buildup around the left fuel vent, and on the ground from the fuel venting throughout the night," and "in my opinion it seemed to indicate that there was still a fair amount of water in the fuel that caused this ice buildup." He wrote, "although I felt I properly drained the tanks prior to takeoff, it seems there was still water trapped in the tanks." After recovery the airplane's engine was prepared with a new propeller and clean fuel at an aircraft maintenance facility. The engine was started, and run through a variety of power settings, without any evidence of mechanical malfunction. The pilot reported that during the forced landing, the landing gear was torn off, structurally damaging the fuselage. He also stated that prior to the accident there were no known mechanical anomalies with the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight inspection, which failed to detect water-contaminated fuel, resulting in a loss of engine power during cruise flight, and subsequent in-flight collision with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC06LA001
- Event ID
- 20051012X01627
- Case number
- ANC06LA001
- 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 2005-10-03.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 39451c5ea78315550e045f24fe47f93429cf19d438aa85a4bfe153c1fd1a88bc; retrieved 2026-09-22T05:19:21.425Z.