ERA25LA285 · Cessna TU206 G
Cessna TU206 G · Accident: nose over/nose down during landing
From Dewitt Field - Old Town Municipal Airport (OLD) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA25LA285
- 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 TU206 G
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 206
- 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
- N9493Z
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dewitt Field - Old Town Municipal Airport (OLD), Old Town, METo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 44 years (built 1981)
- 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
- Landing · landing roll
- 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
- Nose over/nose down
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot of the amphibious airplane reported that he and a passenger had departed earlier that morning from the lake where the airplane was based and flew to a local airport to meet with a mechanic where they discussed future work to the airplane. Afterwards, they departed and flew back to the lake and conducted a normal water landing. As the airplane settled into the water, the pilot reported a more than normal nose down tendency. As the airplane slowed to nearly a full stop with idle power, the forward section of the floats continued to sink, and the airplane subsequently nosed over resulting in substantial damage to the fuselage. The pilot reported that he had noticed on previous flights that the floats seemed to accumulate a large amount of water in the forward three to four compartments of each float. He stated “I feel like it was gallons of water per compartment,” but he had not measured the exact quantity of water that he had pumped from each compartment. The pilot described some steps he took to determine the nature of the issue and tried to learn, “what is considered [a lot] or too much water per compartment.” Following the accident, he reported that upon righting the airplane the forward 5 compartments of the floats were “completely flooded” and the aft 2 compartments contained no water. According to an advisory circular regarding seaplane safety published by the Federal Aviation Administration, “A small amount of water, e.g., a cupful, is not unusual and can occur from condensation or normal seepage.” It also stated, “Finding an excessive amount of water should cue the pilot to look for the source of the leak.” Based on this information, the pilot should have discontinued flying the airplane from water until the nature and source of the leaking floats had been appropriately addressed. Additionally, it is likely that the excessive water accumulation in the forward portion of the floats moved the airplane’s center of gravity forward such that it resulted in the noseover during landing.
Probable cause
The pilot’s decision to operate the airplane with a known deficiency of the floats, which resulted in an accumulation of water in the forward compartments of the floats, a forward center of gravity, and subsequent nose over during a water landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA25LA285
- Event ID
- 20250804200698
- Case number
- ERA25LA285
- 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: ee4fa97d684a432f703fd8e20cbaae53ad5bebe1e3e6bd3ce77debc5e86c4d52; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:10:14.667Z.