CEN12CA305 · Cessna A185F
Cessna A185F · Accident: abrupt maneuver during landing
From Ford Airport (IMT) to Iron County Airport (50D)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN12CA305
- 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 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
- N4742E
- Operator
- Whitehead Dennis C
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ford Airport (IMT), Iron Mountain, MITo Iron County Airport (50D), Crystal Falls, MI
- 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 · landing roll
- 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
- Abrupt maneuver
- 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 oper/perf/capability
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Two deer ran out of a wooded area and toward the runway from left to right in front of the airplane during the landing roll. The pilot applied left rudder in an attempt to avoid the deer, assuming they were going to continue across the runway. One of the deer continued across the runway. The other deer stopped on the runway and turned around to go back into the woods. The pilot applied right rudder in order to avoid the second deer and the airplane ground-looped. The left wing was substantially damaged when it contacted the ground during the ground loop.
Probable cause
The pilot's abrupt maneuver to avoid deer that unexpectedly ran into the airplane's path during the landing roll.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN12CA305
- Event ID
- 20120518X40139
- Case number
- CEN12CA305
- 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, 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: ac0a0f78d59d9cf45188f4a9a5841af6d097cec71843b4974979eea72c501f61; retrieved 2026-09-15T18:10:13.956Z.