ANC15CA026 · Piper PA 22-150 160
Piper PA 22-150 160 · Accident on approach
From Talkeetna, AK to Talkeetna, AK
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC15CA026
- 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
Piper PA 22-150 160
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-22
- 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
- N7347D
- Operator
- Roger Anderson
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Talkeetna, AKTo Talkeetna, AK
- Aircraft age
- About 58 years (built 1957)
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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
- Miscellaneous/other
- 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 flight instructor and private pilot were practicing takeoffs and landings in a float-equipped airplane. The flight instructor stated that on the seventh approach to landing, the private pilot misjudged the airplane's rate of descent, and struck the top of a spruce tree with the right elevator resulting in a full up deflection of the elevator. The airplane entered an uncontrolled descent, and impacted the water in a flat stalled condition sustaining substantial damage to the fuselage and elevator. The flight instructor stated that there were no preaccident mechanical anomalies with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The private pilot's failure to maintain clearance from a spruce tree during final approach, which resulted in a loss of control and hard landing. Contributing to the accident was the flight instructor's failure to adequately monitor the landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC15CA026
- Event ID
- 20150520X11113
- Case number
- ANC15CA026
- 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: ec9b5312ac72b6c96b0a0ca3bb5d4e100352839f7f3662d1972acbc6fd9ef6b5; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:20:02.554Z.