K Bay Air Cessna U206F accident
Cessna U206F · Accident: aircraft structural failure during landing
From Homer Airport (PAHO) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC22LA040
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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 U206F
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 206
- 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
- N592KB
- Operator
- K Bay Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Homer Airport (PAHO), Homer, AKTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 50 years (built 1972)
- 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
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Aircraft structural failure
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was the fourth air tour company airplane to land at a remote beach site as part of a bear viewing flight. The pilot set up for a landing on the same tracks as the three previous company airplanes. During the landing, the left main landing gear wheel touched down first, followed by the right main landing gear wheel. When the right wheel touched down, the pilot heard a “pop” sound and the airplane veered to the right. The airplane slowly came to rest upright and sustained substantial damage to the left wing and right horizontal stabilizer. Postaccident examination revealed that the right main landing gear leg was fractured near the wheel attachment fitting.
Materials laboratory examination of the right main landing gear leg revealed that the gear leg fractured during landing due to fatigue cracks that initiated from localized corrosion pitting. The area of the fatigue cracks which was absent paint and primer, contained many elements typical of salt corrosion in a marine environment. Repeated abrasive wear from landings on rough terrain or runway asphalt had likely removed the protective coatings in the area of the fatigue cracks.
Probable cause
The failure of the right main landing gear leg due to fatigue cracks that initiated from corrosion pitting.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC22LA040
- Event ID
- 20220609105232
- Case number
- ANC22LA040
- 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, cause areas. 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: 73d7cda19cd563b09f31ec8f9857c0cfef96cca5cd6e82dad212e9379aa68710; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:18:51.692Z.