ANC09LA086 · Cessna 180
Cessna 180 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Birchwood Airport (BCV) to Birchwood Airport (BCV)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC09LA086
- 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 180
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 180
- 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
- N4601A
- Operator
- Beam Douglas Jade
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Birchwood Airport (BCV), Chugiak, AKTo Birchwood Airport (BCV), Chugiak, 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
- 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
- Loss of engine power (total)
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot reported that he was approaching his destination airport at the conclusion of a local personal flight. He said that while in cruise flight at 1,200 feet above ground level, the engine began to run rough and lose power. He noticed that the carburetor air temperature was just above the carburetor ice zone marked in red on the gauge, so he applied full carburetor heat, which was followed by a complete loss of engine power. Unable to restart the engine, he selected a marshy tree-covered site as a forced landing area. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the fuselage and wings during the forced landing. A Federal Aviation Administration airworthiness inspector’s postaccident inspection disclosed no evidence any preimpact mechanical problems. An aviation weather reporting station indicated that the temperature was 57 degrees F, and the dew point was 45 degrees F. When these values are entered into a carburetor icing probability chart, the results are in the "serious icing-cruise power" category. Given the lack of any mechanical anomalies it is likely that the formation of carburetor ice resulted in the loss of engine power.
Probable cause
The pilot’s delayed use of carburetor heat while operating in conditions conducive to carburetor icing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC09LA086
- Event ID
- 20090825X05726
- Case number
- ANC09LA086
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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 2009-08-25.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 425951d9bd866440c8e783d36de1c15d8f68131acfbf967fdaba1d0dd4f03916; retrieved 2026-09-15T12:50:16.590Z.