ERA23LA349 · Cessna A185F
Cessna A185F · Accident on approach
From St. Mary's County Regional Airport (2W6) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA23LA349
- 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
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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
- N955LS
- Operator
- Southern Maryland Sea Planes
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From St. Mary's County Regional Airport (2W6), Leonardtown, MDTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 50 years (built 1973)
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern downwind
- 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
- Unknown or undetermined
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot and designated pilot examiner (DPE) departed to complete a private pilot airplane single engine sea rating flight test in the float-equipped airplane. The private pilot navigated without incident to a nearby lake, circled, and entered a left downwind traffic pattern leg for the first water landing of the flight. During his landing checks, and shortly after he reduced engine power and added flaps, the engine lost power. The private pilot announced the loss of power and transferred control of the airplane to the DPE. The DPE pushed the throttle, propeller, and mixture controls forward; however, the engine did not respond. He then switched fuel tanks and navigated towards a corn field ahead. During the forced landing the airplane nosed over, which resulted in substantial damage to the wings and fuselage. A postaccident test run of the fuel-injected engine found that it started and produced normal power with fuel being fed from an external fuel tank placed above the fuselage. Positive fuel flow was observed with the fuel selector placed in the BOTH, LEFT, and RIGHT positions. The loss of engine power could not be duplicated during postaccident testing, and the reason for the loss of engine power that occurred during the accident flight could not be determined.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power during an approach to landing for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA23LA349
- Event ID
- 20230825192936
- Case number
- ERA23LA349
- 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: 065ac416b30c15af8e8b1765e22e28a3f4db2857913e6a461abbb1192f20f33c; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:02:45.440Z.