Acadian Seaplanes Kodiak Aircraft Co Inc KODIAK 100 accident
Kodiak Aircraft Co Inc KODIAK 100 · Accident: hard landing
From Town of East Hampton Airport (JPX) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA26LA261
- 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
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
Kodiak Aircraft Co Inc KODIAK 100
- Aircraft type
- Kodiak 100
- 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
- N726SH
- Operator
- Acadian Seaplanes
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Town of East Hampton Airport (JPX), East Hampton, NYTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 1 year (built 2025)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot of the amphibious airplane reported that he performed a go-around during the first approach to the river seaplane base as the water did not look good (choppy). The water looked good during the second approach and the airplane touched down smooth, but the pilot did not see a large wave off the left side due to flat light, and the left float contacted the wave. The contact resulted in the airplane bouncing up into the air and contacting the water a second time, resulting in a hard landing and collapsed left float strut. The hard landing also resulted in substantial damage to the left elevator. The pilot added that there were no preimpact mechanical malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
An inadvertent collision with a large wave during touchdown on a river, which resulted in a subsequent bounce and hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA26LA261
- Event ID
- 20260706203320
- Case number
- ERA26LA261
- 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, 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: b14edf438309a37a2117cc95ebe67081fc66a09f234ed86bcbcee3ed9c01255e; retrieved 2026-09-17T05:13:57.956Z.