ANC24LA093 · Cessna 180B
Cessna 180B · Accident: aircraft wake turbulence encounter en route
From Beluga, AK (private airstrip) to Lake Hood Seaplane Base (LHD)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC24LA093
- 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 180B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 180
- 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
- N5275E
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Beluga, AK (private airstrip)To Lake Hood Seaplane Base (LHD), Anchorage, AK
- Aircraft age
- About 65 years (built 1959)
- 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
- Aircraft wake turbulence encounter
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported he was inbound to land and was waiting for a break in chatter on the radio to contact the air traffic control tower. He was about 7 miles from the airport, and about 1,050 ft mean sea level when he encountered wake turbulence presumably from a Boeing 747 inbound to an adjacent runway. He stated the airplane violently dropped and he struck his head on the ceiling. He was able to maintain control of the airplane and land uneventfully. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the right wing. The pilot reported there were no mechanical malfunctions or anomalies with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s encounter with wake turbulence, which resulted in substantial damage to the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC24LA093
- Event ID
- 20240916195122
- Case number
- ANC24LA093
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2024-09-14.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 95db38161947d3d21986414b1a23179843c2b820cffa07fec9dcd6ad96d2f60a; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:16:14.310Z.