ANC25LA060 · Piper PA-22-150
Piper PA-22-150 · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From PSXQ · Soldotna, AK to PSXQ · Soldonta, AK
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC25LA060
- 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
- Ongoing
- 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
Piper PA-22-150
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-22
- 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
- N3609Z
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From PSXQ · Soldotna, AKTo PSXQ · Soldonta, AK
- Aircraft age
- About 65 years (built 1960)
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On June 30, 2025, about 1630 Alaska daylight time, a Piper PA 22-150 airplane, N3609Z, was substantially damaged when it was involved in an accident near Chinitna Bay, Alaska. The pilot was not injured. The airplane was operated as a Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 personal flight. The pilot reported that, while en route he heard two or three loud “thuds” followed by reduced rudder control. He said that the airplane began to yaw back and forth and increased when he added engine power. The pilot made the decision to perform a precautionary landing on a remote beach. During the landing the right wheel touched down first, and the airplane veered to the right. The pilot said that he had no rudder control and attempted to correct with left aileron to no avail, subsequently the airplane nosed over. The airplane sustained substantial damage to both wings, lift struts and rudder. Examination of the airframe is pending the recovery of the wreckage.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC25LA060
- Event ID
- 20250701200440
- Case number
- ANC25LA060
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2025-07-01.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 4084ba2fcdf55aa2bf98066e8346fab9c0ce1a6be1c1096904517abd6135d94a; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:01:51.565Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: departure. Misspelled city name; the Alaska community is Soldotna.