LAX99LA166 · Schweizer 269C-1
Schweizer 269C-1 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water during landing
From Buchanan Field (CCR) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX99LA166
- 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
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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
Schweizer 269C-1
- Aircraft type
- Schweizer 269
- Category
- Helicopter
- 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
- N6148V
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Buchanan Field (CCR)To not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- First occurrenceThe 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- 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
- Flightcrew › Flare, delayed
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Supervision, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and student were practicing straight-in autorotations with power recoveries. During the first four autorotations, the student was the primary manipulator of the controls. The student was initiating the flare too high and so the instructor told the student that they would do the next approach together with both of them on the controls. During the flare portion of the ensuing autorotation, the stinger struck the runway surface. The tail rotor then contacted the surface and the helicopter yawed 360 degrees to the right and came to rest approximately 100 feet where the tail rotor struck the runway. The main rotor severed the tail boom. The instructor reported that he believed that the student misinterpreted his instructions to mean that he (the instructor) would be making the primary control inputs, whereas, he had intended for the student to make control inputs to initiate the flare. He planned just to follow through on the controls to guide the student to flare a little lower than on the previous attempts. The flight instructor stated that the accident could have been prevented through 'better communication between student and instructor as to who is responsible for initiating a control input during all phases of flight and especially during critical phases.'
Probable cause
The inadequate supervision of the student pilot by the flight instructor during the practice autorotation, which resulted in a delayed flare and the tail rotor contacting the ground. A factor was a misinterpreted communication between the flight instructor and student.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX99LA166
- Event ID
- 20001205X00510
- Case number
- LAX99LA166
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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. 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: 1becb222f64874d7f750439da03122ecdeba61fd15c4378c8f77913f3e1435b4; retrieved 2026-09-22T15:23:20.781Z.