ERA11GA207 · Cessna A185F
Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Cessna A185F · Accident: VFR encounter with IMC en route
From Ashland, ME (no airport) to Eagle Lake, ME (no airport)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA11GA207
- 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
- Government
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna A185F
- 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
- N724MT
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ashland, ME (no airport)To Eagle Lake, ME (no airport)
- 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
- Public Aircraft
- 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
- 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
- VFR encounter with IMC
- 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
- Personnel issues › Psychological
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was employed as a state game warden, and, on the day of the accident, he was on patrol in the ski-equipped airplane when he received a radio call from another game warden whose snowmobile was stuck on a nearby frozen lake. After landing on the lake and assisting another game warden, the pilot departed on the accident flight, presumably to return to his home base. The other game warden reported that, immediately after the airplane departed, the visibility was reduced to less than 1/2-mile due to snow. Postaccident analysis of position information recovered from a portable global positioning system (GPS) receiver showed that the airplane flew for about 10 minutes after takeoff at a relatively constant GPS altitude of about 1,500 feet mean sea level, or about 200 to 500 feet above ground level (agl). Shortly before the accident, the airplane turned left, away from its previously established course, toward a frozen lake along the route. During the final moments of the flight, the airplane entered a right descending turn from about 300 feet agl. During this time, the airplane was in an estimated 40-degree right bank, and its descent rate increased to in excess of 3,000 feet per minute. Examination of the accident site revealed ground scars and airplane damage consistent with the established descent profile continuing to impact. Examination of the wreckage revealed no evidence of any preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures, although the definitive operational status of the vacuum-driven instruments could not be determined. Analysis of weather information and witness statements were consistent in depicting conditions likely to have produced restricted visibility and possible whiteout conditions in a snow squall over the area at the time of the accident. These restricted visibility conditions would have been conducive to the development of spatial disorientation, and the airplane’s turning ground track and rapid descent were consistent with the pilot losing control of the airplane due to spatial disorientation.
Probable cause
An inadvertent encounter with localized instrument meteorological conditions, which resulted in spatial disorientation and a loss of control.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA11GA207
- Event ID
- 20110325X14309
- Case number
- ERA11GA207
- 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: 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: 17876eaac43fd819387072375d0442a4b54714e1f3435a3b32397490570502f0; retrieved 2026-09-13T21:17:36.684Z.