ANC15CA031 · Aeronca 7EC
Above Alaska Aviation Aeronca 7EC · Accident: hard landing
From Talkeetna Airport (PATK) to Warren "Bud" Woods Palmer Municipal Airport (PAAQ)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC15CA031
- 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
Aeronca 7EC
- Aircraft type
- Aeronca 7
- 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
- N84116
- Operator
- Above Alaska Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Talkeetna Airport (PATK), Talkeenta, AKTo Warren "Bud" Woods Palmer Municipal Airport (PAAQ), Palmer, AK
- Aircraft age
- About 69 years (built 1946)
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot and his instructor were landing in a tailwheel-equipped airplane at night. The student pilot did two full stop landings on the night cross-country flight. During the first landing, the airplane stalled just above the runway, and the front left landing gear made contact with the runway first, resulting in a hard landing. The second landing was a normal, soft touchdown landing. A postflight inspection revealed that a portion of airplane's fuselage, on the left side, sustained substantial damage from the hard landing. The instructor pilot stated that there were no preaccident mechanical anomalies with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The instructor's delayed remedial actions, and the student pilot's failure to maintain adequate airspeed, which resulted in a stall just above the ground and the subsequent hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC15CA031
- Event ID
- 20150528X20204
- Case number
- ANC15CA031
- 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: 07fb0113d6dc3a7ae4d8170c4e530aa3259fff58ad574eec3f3d1c42e8f9c0ab; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:21:40.727Z.