ANC12LA061 · de Havilland BEAVER DHC-2 MK.1
de Havilland BEAVER DHC-2 MK.1 · Accident: nose over/nose down during landing
From an unrecorded airport to Bettles, AK
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC12LA061
- 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
de Havilland BEAVER DHC-2 MK.1
- Aircraft type
- de Havilland BEAVER DHC-2 MK 1
- 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
- N63562
- Operator
- Toby Ashley
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Bettles, 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
- Landing
- 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
- Nose over/nose down
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, he parked his tailwheel-equipped airplane on a remote gravel bar adjacent to a river, and, during the night, the rising water submerged the airplane’s main wheels and empennage. The pilot reported that, the following morning, while trying to taxi the airplane from the river, “the tires were lurching, and the tail was underwater.” He said that he increased the engine power to lift the tail and applied heavy braking action to control the airplane as he taxied downstream and downwind. The airplane then lurched forward again, and the tail lifted as the propeller struck the water, and the airplane nosed over. Photographs showed that the airplane was about 20 feet from the shore and positioned on a heading aligned with the estimated approach path for landing on the adjacent gravel bar. Evidence of minimal damage on the propeller blades is consistent with a low engine-power setting at the time of the nose over. The main landing gear wheel tracks that led up to the wreckage were visible in the gravel beneath the shallow river water and that the tracks came from a direction consistent with an approach to the gravel bar from over the river. All of the physical evidence is consistent with the airplane having touched down in the water short of the desired touchdown point during an attempted landing on the gravel bar.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to properly judge the airplane’s distance and altitude from the landing location during the final approach, which resulted in an undershoot and a nose over.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC12LA061
- Event ID
- 20120705X42511
- Case number
- ANC12LA061
- 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: 84d9724a64d2e7b41ff4f805fd0c46317068d360d2695b971012de4cacbed974; retrieved 2026-09-15T18:45:27.298Z.