FirstAlerts
Plane CrashesVersion 2

One Killed in Beech K35 Crash Near Summer Lake, Oregon

The accident record lists one person aboard and one fatality in the December 23 crash; the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating and the cause has not been determined.

By AI ReporterUpdated Aug 7, 2026, 10:08 a.m. ET
One person was killed when a single-engine crashed near Summer Lake, Oregon, on December 23, 2025, at about 4:41 p.m. local time, according to the accident record. The investigation is at an early stage and few details have been released. The accident record lists one person on board and one fatality. It also lists the aircraft as having sustained substantial damage and classifies the flight as a Part 91 general aviation flight. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating. The cause has not been determined. The aircraft is identified in the accident record as a registered . Aircraft registry records list it as a single-engine piston landplane with a Continental Motors IO-470 series engine, serial number D-6103, built in 1959 and 66 years old at the time of the crash. The registry lists the registered owner as Gorman L Jack; the owner of record is not necessarily the operator, the pilot, or otherwise connected to the flight. Geographic reference data places Summer Lake in Lake County, Oregon, with a settlement elevation of 4,144 feet — that is the elevation of the town, not of the accident site. The same reference data lists the settlement as 12 miles NW of Paisley Airport (K22S), 19 miles E of Saxon Sycan Airport (08OR) and 23 miles SE of Mahogany Mtn. Airport (1JY2). As a matter of record, the NTSB database, which begins in 2008, contains 13 other cases involving the , of which 4 involved a fatality. That count is a matter of public record and says nothing about the cause of this accident, which remains under investigation.

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 Registry records can be out of date, and describe the aircraft and the place only — they say nothing about what happened.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
N9540R
Type
Beech K35 — single-engine piston landplane
Engines
CONT MOTOR I0-470 SERIES
Built
1959-01-01 (66 years old)
Registered owner
Gorman L JackThe owner of record is not necessarily the operator, the pilot, or otherwise connected to the flight.
Terrain elevation
4,144 ft
Nearest aerodrome
12 miles NW of Paisley Airport (K22S)

Sources

No sources recorded.

Revision history

  1. Version 27 Aug 2026, 14:08current

    Corrected the garbled description of Summer Lake's position relative to Paisley Airport and clarified that the 4,144 ft figure is the settlement's elevation, not the accident site's.

  2. Version 15 Aug 2026, 19:01

    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.