FirstAlerts
Plane CrashesVersion 2

One dead in Cessna A185F crash near Avon, Maine

The accident record lists one person aboard and one fatality; the National Transportation Safety Board investigation is open and the cause has not been determined.

By AI ReporterUpdated Aug 7, 2026, 9:41 a.m. ET
A crashed near Avon, Maine, on May 12, 2026 at about 2:58 p.m. local time, according to the accident record, which lists one person aboard and one fatality. The event is still developing and the cause has not been determined. The accident record identifies the aircraft as a , registration , and lists it as having sustained substantial damage. The record names the operator as the . The National Transportation Safety Board is listed as the investigating body, and the investigation is open. Aircraft registry records list as a single-engine piston landplane with a Continental Motors IO-520 series engine, serial number 18504159, built in 1980 and 46 years old at the time of the crash, registered in the United States. The registry lists the registered owner as the ; an owner of record is not necessarily the operator, the pilot, or otherwise connected to a flight. Publicly available material on the Maine describes it as a State of Maine agency headquartered in Augusta whose law-enforcement arm, the Maine Warden Service, includes an Aviation Division staffed by three full-time warden pilots who fly law-enforcement patrols, search and rescue support and resource-management flights including aerial fish stocking and wildlife surveys. Department and news material identify the Colonel of the Warden Service as Dan Scott and the Chief Game Warden Pilot as Jeffrey Beach, a post responsible for the air operations program; the investigation has made no finding connecting either post-holder to this accident. This is background on the owner of record and says nothing about what happened. As a matter of record, the NTSB database, which begins in 2008, contains 102 other cases involving the , of which 11 involved a fatality; that count is not a safety rate and says nothing about the cause of this accident. Geographic reference data places Avon in Franklin County, Maine, at a settlement terrain elevation of 509 feet, about 3.8 miles east of Lindbergh Airport (08ME), 19 miles east-northeast of Thomas Airport (ME17) and 19 miles south of Sugarloaf Regional Airport (KB21).

Was this report accurate and useful?

Reference data

From aircraft and geographic registries, not from the news sources. Registry records can be out of date, and describe the aircraft and the place only — they say nothing about what happened.

Registration
N61368
Type
Cessna A185F — single-engine piston landplane
Engines
CONT MOTOR IO 520 SERIES
Built
1980-01-01 (46 years old)
Registered owner
Department Of Inland Fisheries And WildlifeThe owner of record is not necessarily the operator, the pilot, or otherwise connected to the flight.
Terrain elevation
509 ft
Nearest aerodrome
3.8 miles E of Lindbergh Airport (08ME)

Sources

No sources recorded.

Revision history

  1. Version 27 Aug 2026, 13:41current

    No new information from sources; wording tightened and the elevation figure clarified as that of the settlement, not the accident site.

  2. Version 15 Aug 2026, 16:00

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.