Pacific Wings de Havilland BEAVER DHC-2 MK.1 accident
de Havilland BEAVER DHC-2 MK.1 · Accident: abrupt maneuver en route
From Petersburg, AK to Petersburg, AK
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC13FA054
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
- N616W
- Operator
- Pacific Wings
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Petersburg, AKTo Petersburg, 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that the accident flight was his fourth flight and the third tour flight of the day in a float-equipped airplane. The weather had deteriorated throughout the day with lowering ceilings, light rain, and fog on the mountain ridges. The pilot said that when approaching a mountain pass, he initiated a climb by adding a "little bit" of flap (about 1 pump of the flap handle actuator) but did not adjust the engine power from the cruise power setting. He noted his airspeed at 80 knots, with a 200-feet-per-minute climb on the vertical speed indicator. He was having difficulty seeing over the cowling due to the nose-high attitude, when he suddenly noticed trees in his flight path. He initiated an immediate left turn; the airplane stalled, and began to drop, impacting the mountainous, tree-covered terrain.
A passenger reported that the weather conditions at the time of the accident consisted of tufts of low clouds, and good visibility. They did not enter the clouds at any time during the flight. He reported that the airplane made a left turn, stalled, and then made a sharp left turn right before impact. The airplane seemed to be operating fine, and he heard no unusual sounds, other than the engine speed seemed to increase significantly right before impact.
The pilot reported that there were no preaccident mechanical anomalies that would have precluded normal operation, and the postaccident examination of the airframe and engine revealed no evidence of mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to maintain adequate altitude above the trees, and his subsequent failure to maintain adequate airspeed while maneuvering to avoid the trees, which resulted in an inadvertent aerodynamic stall/spin and an uncontrolled descent.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC13FA054
- Event ID
- 20130605X32343
- Case number
- ANC13FA054
- 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: 1a7eeafdc26c1588954068e500a1894fd12c7b61740e3c56cc4561db2405fa3c; retrieved 2026-09-14T15:57:57.756Z.