Willow Creek Aviation Piper PA-18-150 accident

The pilot was conducting a commercial on-demand charter flight to shuttle two individuals in support of a remote hunting excursion. The accident flight passenger and a friend chartered with the pilot’s company to transport them and their hunting gear to a base camp. Three days before the accident, the pilot and the two hunters departed from the company’s base airport and conducted a scouting trip in the pilot’s Cessna 206 airplane to check out the area for a possible hunting location and a suitable landing area for the pilot’s PA-18 airplane. On the morning of the accident, about 0830, the pilot and the two hunters departed the company’s base airport in the Cessna 206 airplane, and they landed at a remote airstrip in an area about 50 miles southeast of the planned base camp. The hunters and hunting gear were offloaded and the pilot returned to the company base in the Cessna 206 to pick up his PA-18 airplane. The pilot returned to the remote airstrip in the PA-18 and loaded one hunter and his gear for the flight to the hunting location. The pilot informed the other hunter he was expected to return in about 2 hours to pick him up and transport him to the planned hunting location. The airplane departed the remote airstrip about 1150, and no further communications were received from the pilot or passenger. About 1600, after the airplane did not return, the hunter contacted family members using a satellite messaging device to see if they were aware of the overdue airplane’s status. Over the next several hours, family members and friends attempted to communicate with the pilot and passenger’s satellite messaging devices, but those attempts were unsuccessful. Search and rescue operations began that evening, but initial search flights were suspended due to poor weather. The following day, the airplane wreckage was located at the bottom of an estimated 500 to 600 ft deep narrow ravine. Due to the unique challenges posed by the accident location, neither the occupants nor the wreckage were recovered from the accident site. Weather information near the accident site was limited due to a lack of weather reporting facilities in the remote accident location. Weather advisories active for the area that included the accident site included mountains occasionally obscured by clouds/precipitation with deteriorating conditions. Based upon available weather data and the impact evidence, it is likely that the pilot entered an area of reduced visibility and was unable to maneuver the airplane to avoid the terrain before the airplane impacted the ravine. Although the known circumstances of the accident are consistent with a controlled flight into terrain event, the factual information available was limited because the wreckage was not recovered and no autopsy or toxicology of the pilot could be performed; therefore, whether other circumstances may have contributed to the accident could not be determined.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset