GAA17CA473 · Cessna 180 UNDESIGNAT
Cessna 180 UNDESIGNAT · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing
From Wasilla Airport (PAWS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- GAA17CA473
- 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
Cessna 180 UNDESIGNAT
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 180
- 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
- N9455C
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Wasilla Airport (PAWS), Wasilla, AKTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 62 years (built 1955)
- 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
- Loss of control on ground
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- 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
According to the pilot, he made two passes over a dry creek bed to assess a potential landing site. The second pass was accomplished up-creek into rising terrain. The airplane was configured with full power and with flaps at 20°, and it was about 50 ft above ground level at 80 mph. The pilot reported that the airplane encountered a downdraft as it transitioned from overflying the trees to overflying the creek bed, which he attempted to correct, but the airplane aerodynamically stalled.
Following the stall, the pilot attempted to land on a dry creek bed. The airplane touched down on the creek bed, then bounced and descended into a "dry cut channel." The airplane came to rest nose down in a near vertical position. The airplane was destroyed by a postcrash fire.
According to the National Transportation Safety Board's Pilot Aircraft Accident Report, the pilot reported that the event could have been avoided by making the low pass along descending terrain at a higher airspeed.
The pilot reported that there were no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The airplane’s encounter with a downdraft while maneuvering at a low altitude, which resulted in the exceedance of the airplane’s critical angle of attack and a subsequent aerodynamic stall.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record GAA17CA473
- Event ID
- 20170807X40213
- Case number
- GAA17CA473
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2017-08-02.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 87641f686d4473e2b5d80c92ef6961e3da7c9684550591c8bac92c8be6500efd; retrieved 2026-09-16T05:40:19.046Z.