ANC25FA079 · Piper J3C-65
Piper J3C-65 · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC25FA079
- 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
- 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 J3C-65
- Aircraft type
- Piper J3
- 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
- N5050R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 80 years (built 1945)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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 July 25, 2025, about 0916 Alaska daylight time, a Piper J3C-65 airplane, N5050R, was substantially damaged when it was involved in an accident near Dillingham, Alaska. The pilot was fatally injured. The airplane was operated as a Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 personal flight. According to witnesses, shortly after performing a touch-and-go landing on the gravel surface adjacent to Runway 19 at the Dillingham Airport, as the airplane climbed to an altitude of about 200 ft above the runway, the engine experienced a momentary loss of power, followed by an engine restart. The nose of the airplane then pitched up, slowed, and the left wing stalled, resulting in an uncontrolled, nose-down, vertical descent. During the descent, the airplane engine reportedly experienced another loss of power. The airplane impacted the runway approximately 680 feet northeast of the departure end of Runway 19 and came to rest inverted, resulting in substantial damage to the fuselage and wings. (See figure 1)
Figure 1. Accident site location on the Dillingham Airport. A witness captured a portion of the accident sequence on a cell phone video. See figures 2A and 2B.
Figure 2A. Accident airplane on initial climb from Runway 19 (Provided by Alaska State Troopers)
Figure 2B. Accident airplane during the uncontrolled descent (Provided by Alaska State Troopers)
The wreckage has been moved to a secure location and a detailed NTSB examination is pending.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC25FA079
- Event ID
- 20250725200633
- Case number
- ANC25FA079
- 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, coordinates. 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: 2611e61a1e276c2d64175c575c4729dd8977947d4965d35ccce9adc558782eb8; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:07:11.031Z.