Hageland Aviation Services Cessna 208B accident
Cessna 208B · Accident: VFR encounter with IMC en route
From Wiley Post Will Rogers Memorial Airport (PABR) to Atqasuk Edward Burnell Sr Memorial Airport (ATK)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC18LA031
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Unknown
Cessna 208B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 208
- 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
- N814GV
- Operator
- Hageland Aviation Services
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Wiley Post Will Rogers Memorial Airport (PABR), Utqiagvik, AKTo Atqasuk Edward Burnell Sr Memorial Airport (ATK), Atqasuk, AK
- Aircraft age
- About 16 years (built 2002)
- 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 · descent
- 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
- VFR encounter with IMC
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was on a visual flight rules flight transporting mail to a remote village. He reported that when he was about 15 minutes from the destination, he checked the automated weather observing system (AWOS) for updated weather information for the destination and recalled that the visibility was reported as 7 miles. However, the information he recalled was not consistent with what was actually reported by the AWOS; 18 minutes before the accident, the AWOS reported no more than 1 3/4 miles visibility.
As he descended the airplane from 2,500 ft to 1,500 ft in the terminal area, he observed reduced visibility conditions that would require an instrument approach procedure.
According to the pilot, while maneuvering toward the initial approach fix, he heard the autopilot disconnect, and the airplane began an uncommanded descent. He said that he remembered pulling on the control wheel and thought he had leveled off, but then the airplane impacted terrain, which resulted in substantial damage to the fuselage, vertical stabilizer, and rudder. He could not recall if he had heard terrain warnings or alerts before the impact.
An airplane performance study indicated that the airplane was in a continuous descent from 2,500 ft until the final data point about 12 ft above the surface; the airplane was not leveled off at any time during the descent. In the final 15 seconds of recorded data, the rate of descent increased from about 500 fpm to about 2,300 fpm before decreasing to 1,460 fpm at the last recorded data point.
Postaccident examinations of the airframe, engine, flight control, and autopilot components revealed no mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation or affected flight controllability.
It is likely that the unexpected instrument approach procedure increased the pilot's workload as he maneuvered to set up for the approach. Further, when the autopilot disconnected, the airplane continued to descend; although the pilot reported that he heard the autopilot disconnect, he did not arrest the airplane's descent rate. Given the low visibility conditions, it is likely that the pilot did not detect the airplane's descent, and the airplane descended into the terrain.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to continue a visual flight rules flight into an area of instrument meteorological conditions and his subsequent failure to level the airplane after the autopilot disconnected, which resulted in a collision with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC18LA031
- Event ID
- 20180411X94535
- Case number
- ANC18LA031
- 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: 3d16e0003ea00b032d16d265fa507d0b3fc2c8e3c3cbcddb05d88b30101111ae; retrieved 2026-09-16T06:49:02.571Z.