ERA22LA300 · Cessna A185F
Cessna A185F · Accident: windshear or thunderstorm during initial climb
From an unrecorded airport to Westerly State Airport (KWST)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA22LA300
- 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
- N2423A
- Operator
- Hutter Charles G
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Westerly State Airport (KWST), Westerly, RI
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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
- Windshear or thunderstorm
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot described the takeoff from the 2,000 ft-long turf runway surrounded by tall trees. He stated the airplane was making “takeoff power” and that all instruments were “in the green.” At the departure end of the runway the airplane encountered “windshear or a downdraft” and that the leaves in the treetops were being “pushed down.” The 6,000-hour pilot said he had never encountered windshear or a downdraft like it before. He said he adjusted the pitch attitude to best angle of climb, but that the airplane settled into the trees and descended to the ground while substantially damaging the wings, fuselage, and the empennage. The Federal Aviation Administration inspector who responded to the accident site discussed the forecast and PIREPS for low-level windshear with the pilot. The pilot said he had reviewed the weather, but as it was “nothing he hadn’t flown in before,” he elected to depart. The pilot reported that there were no pre-accident mechanical malfunctions or failures of the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s encounter with known and forecast adverse weather which resulted in a collision with trees during the initial climb.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA22LA300
- Event ID
- 20220707105428
- Case number
- ERA22LA300
- 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: 04964ec5b89ab14d12f7c41cb2e1ac923c5e21988f3cb3ae5457060676c3e618; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:25:33.815Z.