CHI06LA175 · Cessna A185E
Cessna A185E · Accident: hard landing
From Jorgensen's Landing Seaplane Base (MY34) to Leaders Clear Lake Airport (8Y6)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI06LA175
- 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
- 1 · 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 A185E
- 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
- N1972U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Jorgensen's Landing Seaplane Base (MY34), Prior Lake, MNTo Leaders Clear Lake Airport (8Y6), Clear Lake, MN
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 › Flare, misjudged
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The amphibian airplane nosed over during landing on a turf runway. The pilot stated that during the landing the airplane initially touched down on the main landing gear, while he held the forward landing gear off the ground. The pilot reported that when the forward landing gear touched down the airplane "flipped onto its back." First responders reported that they found the airplane upside down, facing north. Local authorities reported that the airplane was located in the grass area prior to the gravel and asphalt sections of the runway. There were two distinct ground scars leading up to the main wreckage. The width between the two ground scars was consistent with the width between the airplane's two floats. Relative to the runway direction, the right and left ground scars were 103 and 92 feet long, respectively. An automated weather observation system located 7.2 nautical miles northwest of the airport, reported the winds were from 270 at 9 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot's misjudged flare that resulted in a hard landing and subsequent nose over. A factor to the accident was the grass runway that the forward landing gear dug into during the hard landing, resulting in the amphibian airplane nosing over.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI06LA175
- Event ID
- 20060727X01024
- Case number
- CHI06LA175
- 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: 06ccc31408209e0973235f398587d316003f7ebc26fe8cc63790db765c3befe1; retrieved 2026-09-20T17:13:39.708Z.