ANC17FA003 · Cessna 172
Cessna 172 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Wasilla Airport (IYS) to Wasilla Airport (IYS)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC17FA003
- 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
- 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 172
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N6353E
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Wasilla Airport (IYS), Wasilla, AKTo Wasilla Airport (IYS), Wasilla, AK
- Aircraft age
- About 57 years (built 1959)
- 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
- Maneuvering · low-altitude flying
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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 student pilot was flying the airplane over a remote river valley as his friends and relatives were driving their all-terrain vehicles in the valley. The pilot executed a touch-and-go landing on a gravel bar, and, just after takeoff, the airplane entered a steep climb and turned to the left. During the left turn, the wings of the airplane rolled perpendicular to the ground, and it descended in a near-vertical, nose-down attitude to ground impact. A postaccident examination of the airframe and engine revealed no evidence of mechanical malfunctions that would have precluded normal operation. The flight profile was consistent with the pilot exceeding the airplane's critical angle of attack, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall and loss of control at an altitude too low to allow for recovery.
Probable cause
The student pilot's exceedance of the airplane's critical angle of attack during a steep climbing turn following a touch-and-go landing, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall at too low of an altitude to recover.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC17FA003
- Event ID
- 20161030X10526
- Case number
- ANC17FA003
- 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: f6cda5bb1c49c71abaff89711f6d1e511c758dfc5deaa659a0b54101ce3b2d51; retrieved 2026-09-14T22:01:51.814Z.