ANC23FA004 · Piper PA-18
Piper PA-18 · Accident: low altitude operation/event en route
From Wolf Lake Airport (4AK6) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC23FA004
- 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
- 1 · 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
Piper PA-18
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-18
- 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
- N7123K
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Wolf Lake Airport (4AK6), Palmer, AKTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 72 years (built 1950)
- 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
- En route
- 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
- Low altitude operation/event
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Wire
- 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 › Physical environment
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot was flying low over a river when the airplane impacted an unmarked cable suspended about 30 ft above the water. The wings were separated from the airframe and a portion of the cable remained wrapped around the right wing. The engine remained attached to the airframe. The propeller blades remained attached to the engine crankshaft flanges, and gouges consistent with cable impact were present along the leading edge of one of the blades.
Although the pilot had mild-to-moderate coronary artery disease, given the circumstances of the accident, it is unlikely that the pilot’s coronary artery disease contributed to the crash.
Toxicology testing of the pilot’s tissue indicated the presence of a cannabis product. One accredited laboratory detected the psychoactive cannabinoid delta-9-THC in blood, while the other did not. No active metabolite of delta-9-THC was detected, and the nonpsychoactive metabolite carboxy-delta-9-THC was detected at low levels only. Based on these results and the accident circumstances, it is unlikely that cannabis significantly affected the pilot’s decision to fly at low altitude or his failure to avoid the unmarked cable.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to fly at low altitude, which resulted in a collision with a cable.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC23FA004
- Event ID
- 20221114106278
- Case number
- ANC23FA004
- 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: 6c6b1bc7482b3f765a866559ca4cebad8178769fc873e9185921dfac65da52de; retrieved 2026-09-15T07:54:07.716Z.