ANC18CA052 · Cessna 182 A
Cessna 182 A · Accident: hard landing
From Birchwood Airport (BCV) to Birchwood Airport (BCV)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC18CA052
- 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 182 A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N5020D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Birchwood Airport (BCV), Chugiak, AKTo Birchwood Airport (BCV), Chugiak, AK
- Aircraft age
- About 60 years (built 1958)
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
- Personnel issues › Psychological
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that, while performing a high-speed taxi to evaluate an erratic airspeed indicator, the airplane began to porpoise, so she performed a takeoff and maneuvered the airplane around the traffic pattern to land. The pilot was distracted by other airplanes in the traffic pattern and did not perform the landing checklist and felt "behind" the airplane. On final approach, she pushed in the throttle control to correct for a rapid descent rate; however, the engine did not respond, and the airplane landed hard in gravel short of the intended runway. The pilot added that, after the impact, she noted that the mixture control was fully out and that she may have pulled out the wrong engine control during the approach. A witness on the ground reported that the airplane descended rapidly in a flat attitude with the propeller rotating slowly. The witness responded to the accident scene and noted that the mixture, throttle, and propeller controls were all pulled out and that the pilot could not explain how that happened, but she did state that she was very distracted while flying in the pattern. The pilot stated that she had not flown for about 8 months and had no intent to fly that day. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the fuselage.
Probable cause
The pilot's mismanagement of the engine controls due to distraction in the traffic pattern, which resulted in a hard landing short of the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC18CA052
- Event ID
- 20180703X40147
- Case number
- ANC18CA052
- 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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2018-07-01.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 0905f4d7b4d3f47461b13811125d999391bac411fc08b5233cc5268d17f52f3b; retrieved 2026-09-16T07:44:41.603Z.