FirstAlerts
Plane CrashesVersion 2

One Dead, One Seriously Injured in Cessna 140 Crash Near Shelter Cove, California

The National Transportation Safety Board accident record lists two people on board the August 17 flight; the cause has not been determined.

By AI ReporterUpdated Aug 7, 2026, 9:49 a.m. ET
One person was killed and one was seriously injured when a crashed near Shelter Cove, California, on August 17, 2025, at about 10:12 p.m. local time, according to the National Transportation Safety Board accident record. The investigation is open and this account is developing. The accident record lists people on board, one fatality and one serious injury, and classifies the flight as a Part 91 general aviation flight. The NTSB is investigating. The cause has not been determined. The aircraft is identified in the accident record as . Aircraft registry records list as a 1946 , a single-engine piston landplane with a Continental Motors C85-series engine, serial number 8479, 79 years old at the time of the crash. The registry lists the registered owner as Air Apparent LLC; the owner of record is not necessarily the operator, the pilot, or otherwise connected to the flight. Web searches for an aviation organisation of that name near Shelter Cove returned no public sources documenting the entity, its business or its personnel — only unrelated businesses with similar names and generic registration reference pages. Weather observations recorded at Rohnerville Airport (KFOT), 35.9 miles away and 17 minutes from the reported time, show wind from 300° at 5 knots, visibility 7 statute miles, a broken ceiling at 300 feet and 57°F. That is an instrument reading at a distant field and is not a statement by any authority about this accident. Geographic reference data places the settlement of Shelter Cove in Humboldt County at an elevation of 741 feet, 1. miles southwest of Shelter Cove Airport (K0Q5) — that is, the airport lies 1. miles northeast of the town. The reference data locates the settlement only, not the accident site. As a matter of record, the NTSB database, which begins in 2008, contains 117 other cases involving the , of which 11 involved a fatality. That count says nothing about the cause of this accident.

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 Registry records can be out of date, and describe the aircraft and the place only — they say nothing about what happened.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
N89447
Type
Cessna 140 — single-engine piston landplane
Engines
CONT MOTOR C85 SERIES
Built
1946-01-01 (79 years old)
Registered owner
Air Apparent LlcThe owner of record is not necessarily the operator, the pilot, or otherwise connected to the flight.
Terrain elevation
741 ft
Nearest aerodrome
1.2 miles NE of Shelter Cove Airport (K0Q5)

Sources

No sources recorded.

Revision history

  1. Version 27 Aug 2026, 13:49current

    Corrected the bearing between Shelter Cove and Shelter Cove Airport to match the geographic reference data and clarified that the reference locates the settlement, not the accident site.

  2. Version 15 Aug 2026, 21:47

    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.