ANC21LA022 · Cessna A185F
Cessna A185F · Accident: system/component malfunction/failure (non-power) during initial climb
From an unrecorded airport to Wolf Lake Airport (4AK6)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC21LA022
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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 A185F
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 185
- 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
- N1848R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Wolf Lake Airport (4AK6), Wasilla, AK
- Aircraft age
- About 47 years (built 1974)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- System/component malfunction/failure (non-power)
- 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 systems
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After takeoff from the remote frozen snow-covered lake, with the hydraulic-wheel-ski-equipped airplane, the unapproved retainer clip that the pilot had installed holding the right rear ski check cable disconnected for undetermined reasons. Subsequently, the right rear check cable “came loose” from the fuselage attach fitting and the right ski rotated to a nose-high position. The pilot was able to maintain control of the airplane; however, a “very serious” vibration was noted in the right horizontal stabilizer, and he chose to return to the departure lake to make a precautionary landing.
The pilot landed on untracked snow and as the ski was coming down “into its normal landing position,” the airplane veered hard to the right. The right main landing gear separated from the fuselage and the right wing impacted the snow. The fuselage sustained substantial damage.
There was a service bulletin (SB) published for the inspection and replacement of the ski yoke. The pilot reported that both he and his mechanic were unaware of the SB and that it had not been complied with. Compliance with information in the SB was not mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The weld applied to the yoke joints failed due to lack of penetration of the weld metal into the base metal of the joints. The failure was a known issue and thus the accident could have been prevented by either continuous inspections of the welds, installation of the finger strap repair, or replacement of the yoke.
Probable cause
Installation of improper hardware on the ski check cable. Contributing to the accident was the inadequate inspection of the ski yokes, which resulted in the subsequent failure of the right main landing gear ski yoke and collapse of the right main landing gear during the precautionary landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC21LA022
- Event ID
- 20210309102736
- Case number
- ANC21LA022
- 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, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2021-03-05.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 2a72081bab403515dfbd2c1c98d9b779e87ebc0e0b4059076a44eed91ca3a275; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:47:52.537Z.