ANC26LA032 · Cessna A185F
Cessna A185F · Accident: landing gear collapse
From Remote Strip, AK to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC26LA032
- 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
Cessna A185F
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 185
- 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
- N92DC
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Remote Strip, AKTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 51 years (built 1975)
- 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
- Landing gear collapse
- 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 April 24, 2026, about 1045 Alaska daylight time, a wheel/ski-equipped Cessna 185 airplane, N92DC, was substantially damaged in an accident at Aniak Airport (ANI), Aniak, Alaska. The pilot and one passenger were not injured. The flight was being operated as a business flight under the provisions of Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91. According to the pilot, the airplane was departing from a rough, uneven, snow and tundra-covered site when, just before becoming airborne, the left wheel/ski assembly separated from the main landing gear (MLG) leg. Although the assembly detached from the gear leg, it remained connected to the airplane by the wheel/ski cable system. After confirming that the airplane remained controllable, the pilot elected to continue to Aniak Airport and perform an emergency landing where emergency response personnel and resources were available. While en route, he maintained a very low airspeed to prevent the dangling wheel/ski assembly from striking the wing lift strut. During the emergency landing at Aniak Airport, the left MLG leg contacted the gravel-covered runway, causing the airplane to pitch forward abruptly and overturn. The airplane came to rest inverted and sustained substantial damage to the wings, fuselage, and empennage. See figure 1.
Figure 1. Accident airplane following emergency landing. (Aniak Airport Operations Photo) On July 8, after the airplane wreckage was recovered to Wasilla, Alaska, a portion of the fractured spring-steel MLG leg was harvested from the wreckage and sent to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Materials Laboratory in Washington, D.C., for examination. The results of that examination are pending.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC26LA032
- Event ID
- 20260424202882
- Case number
- ANC26LA032
- 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: 3518d2b2a32009d652ceea7992ee22a20b820e4542ec8030e6e2f97a49beace7; retrieved 2026-09-16T21:19:40.473Z.