Showa Aviation Cessna 404 accident
Cessna 404 · Accident
From Nakatsugawa to an unrecorded destination
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's registration. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC08WA021
- 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
- Unknown · led by another country; figures from NTSB notifications
- API-reported fatalities
- 2 · 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
- Not recorded
Cessna 404
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 404
- 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
- Unknown Narrative disagrees
- Operator
- Showa Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From NakatsugawaTo not recorded
- 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
- Non-U.S., Commercial
- 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
- Not recorded
- Defining eventThe 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
- Not recorded
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On November 15, 2007, about 1030 Japan Standard Time, a Cessna 404 airplane, JA-5257, was destroyed when it collided with steep terrain on the slopes of Mt. Etna, near Nakatsugawa City, Japan. The airplane, operated by Showa Aviation Co., was conducting a photo flight in the area. The flight was conducted under the provisions of the Civil Aviation Regulations of Japan. The pilot and the photographer received fatal injuries. A company engineer received serious injuries.
The accident investigation is under the jurisdiction of the Government of Japan. This report is for informational purposes only, and contains only the information released by, or obtained from the Government of Japan. Further information pertaining to this accident may be obtained from:
Aircraft and Railways Accidents Investigation Commission Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport 2-1-2, Kasumigaseki, Chiyoda-ku Tokyo 100-8918, Japan
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC08WA021
- Event ID
- 20080311X00295
- Case number
- ANC08WA021
- 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: coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the UTC date the NTSB stores; the local time zone is not recorded, so the local date may differ by a day.
- API snapshot SHA-256: f8be3c1d78a5f6552e165e540e27fb37c72ea5772a4b3c66c4f7b4b7f9c5a0e7; retrieved 2026-09-18T12:54:35.646Z.