WPR26LA090 · Lake LA-4-200
Lake LA-4-200 · Accident: nose over/nose down during landing
From Skagit Regional Airport (BVS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR26LA090
- 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
Lake LA-4-200
- Aircraft type
- Lake LA-4
- 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
- N48X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Skagit Regional Airport (BVS), Burlington, WATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 53 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
- Landing
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On January 16, 2026, at 1609 Pacific daylight time, a Lake LA-4-200, N48X sustained substantial damage when it was involved in an accident near Dewey, Washington. The flight instructor and student pilot were uninjured. The amphibious airplane was operated as a Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 instructional flight. The flight instructor stated that he was conducting familiarization training with a student. They departed Skagit Regional Airport (BVS), Burlington/Mount Vernon, Washington, and were performing water landings at Lake Campbell, Washington. Upon touching down on the water the nose pitched forward in the water, resulting in a broken windscreen and substantial damage to the airplane. The engine would not start so they paddled to shore. Preliminary examination of the airplane showed damage to the nose gear doors. The flight instructor believed that the nose landing gear was prevented from retracting completely due to wheel contact with the landing gear door. The flight instructor told investigators that he visually confirmed the main landing gear were retracted prior to landing using the convex mirrors located on the aircraft’s sponsons. The airplane was retained for further examination.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR26LA090
- Event ID
- 20260126202343
- Case number
- WPR26LA090
- 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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2026-01-17.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 2368a562b1c25bd59afe3e20b1a5d771651be78694a5a7197d899ac6cff79719; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:41:47.197Z.